I beg to present an humble petition from the Trustees of the British Museum, humbly praying this Honourable House to grant them such further support towards enabling them to carry on the execution of the trusts reposed in them by Parliament for the general benefit of learning and useful knowledge as this House shall deem fit—( King's Recommendation signified );to lie upon the Table.

In pursuance of the Resolution just passed by the House, I appoint 12 o'clock noon To-morrow as the time, and No. 10 Committee Room as the place in which the Ballot will be taken.

Although, Mr. Speaker, for some years I have not been in every sense of the word a stranger within your gates, and although my former connection with your proceedings in another capacity should perhaps have accustomed me to the atmosphere of this House—I do not refer to the physical atmosphere of the House although that doubtless requires acclimitisation—I do not for that reason rise with any less trepidation than that experienced by new Members who have had no previous connection with this House. I am quite convinced that I rise with far more trepidation than was manifested by certain new Members on the opposite benches last Session who, although they prefaced their maiden efforts with the customary formula, seemed to be, rather than craving the indulgence of the House, challenging it to mortal combat. I think hon. Members opposite will agree with me that some of them rushed in rather precipitately even where the angels of the front Opposition Bench feared to tread. I am not possessed of their self-assurance

3.0 P.M.

I can only plead, as a justification of my intervention in this Debate, a sincere ambition to contribute some feasible suggestion towards the solution of that problem which we are all agreed is one of the gravest Parliament has ever had to face. In the Gracious Speech from the Throne a hope was expressed for the development of trade within the Empire. I regret humbly that no further mention was made of Empire settlement and emigration to the Dominions. This subject was only discussed in a very cursory manner last Session. It was only dealt with adequately by, I think, one Member, the hon. and gallant Member for Bournemouth (Lieut.-Colonel Croft), and was mentioned by two or three others. I invite the House to believe that this is a question which is not only of supreme importance but of supreme urgency. It has been the custom in Debates on unemployment to attribute in a greater or lesser degree our present deplorable circumstances to the War, but had the War never been waged we should still have been faced with a far sterner proposition than any presented to us by the fortuitous circumstances of our disputes with foreign Powers. The area of this Kingdom is limited, but the potentialities of the increase of population are infinite. No schemes of housing or re-distribution of wealth, no social reform of any kind whatever can keep pace with the growth of population. You may have as many revolutions as you like, you may turn the social order upside down, you may call to your aid the novel expedients of the hon. Member for Motherwell (Mr. Newbold), but you will not increase by one square inch the area of this kingdom, nor, with all your teaching and preaching, will you effectually control the birth rate. I know it is not good art to overload a speech of this character with statistics, but I should like to reinforce my argument with a few figures for the express purpose of calling the attention of the House and especially of the Government, to a disquieting aspect of this question. It is not necessary for me to refer to the birth rate beyond reminding the House that the population of this country increased by over 1,000,000 since the year 1913, which incidentally proves how valuable was the panic advice of our amateur sociologists when they appealed to all young persons during the War to marry in haste and increase the population indefinitely at leisure. I want to draw the attention of the House to what, for want of a better phrase, I may term the life rate. I believe it is a fact that, during the last decennial period, juvenile mortality under the age of 15 has decreased by 13 percent., and the figures at the other end of the scale show a no less remarkable improvement. In the last decennial period the number of the population over 70 years of age has increased by something like 200,000. The more perfect your reforms are, the more social reforms you introduce, the better those figures will become, but at the same time the area of England will remain as it was in the beginning. Some 13 years ago I unsuccessfully contested an election, at the time when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was still preaching the great Imperial idea, and I remember that we, his disciples, were held up to scorn and ignominy by all sections of the Opposition as jingoes and idealists. I believe the great Imperial idea has a deeper significance now that we realise, from the lessons of two great ware and from the need of a readjustment of our population, how closely interwoven are the fortunes of this country and the Empire overseas. I am at a loss to understand why the Labour party has taken so little interest in matters that concern the Empire. It may be that the great Imperial idea was our conception on this side, and certainly nobody an say that plagiarism of our ideas is one of the besetting sins of the Labour party. They seem to consider that Russia and Germany are fitter objects for their solicitude. Personally, I do not share their infatuation for Russians in their present frame of mind or for Germans in any frame of mind. My affections are engaged more with our Dominions overseas. I consider it a more natural affinity and a more wholesome love. The great Imperial idea was, perhaps, the greatest idea that any party could conceive—the idea of making the Empire one great State, with mutual sympathies and mutual interests. It has ceased to be regarded as an empty boast.

But emigration is only in its infancy. There is no doubt about it that there are two conditions precedent to its being of the slightest avail. We must, first of all, make the waste places of the Empire fit for emigrants to live in; and, secondly, we must put emigration on a much broader and more scientific basis. I was reading an interesting article by Dean Inge recently. [ Laughter. ] I am glad that one who is considered gloomy should raise a smile. It was a most interesting article, but it contained a fallacy. He pointed out that the map of our Colonies is an illusory one, for this reason, that these vast spaces painted red are not really of use to us, because they are largely uninhabitable and irreclaimable. But who dares to say, with the recent achievements of science in mind, that any waste spaces are irreclaimable? Only in the last few weeks there has been accomplished a journey across the Sahara which would have been unthinkable a year or two ago. We need have no fear that there are not plenty of waste spaces to be exploited. Necessity is the mother of invention, and there is no limit to human ingenuity. Further, news is just to hand from Mr. Urquhart, Administrator of the Northern Territory, that a huge tract of fertile country has recently been opened up. I think it is called the Alice Springs Territory in Central Australia, and its tremendous potentialities are now at our service. My point is that if you are going to encourage schemes of emigration, the Colonies must surely realise that it is as much to their interests to play their part as it is for us to play ours. They must develop their country and their transport, their irrigation, their plant and everything else incidental to national prosperity. We, on our side, must spend capital to put emigration on a better basis.

I hesitate to touch upon a rather thorny and controversial subject in my maiden speech, but it is, I am inclined to think, inconceivable that the Government should be exacting from the taxpayers no less than £8,000,000 in this financial year to maintain an Arab State in Iraq, when that money could be producing a far better dividend by spending it upon emigration. I may be very insular in my prejudices, but my sympathies are less with the Arabs of Iraq than with the so-called arabs who inhabit streets much nearer home than the Near East and who, when all is said and done, in spite of the baneful surroundings in which they live in our crowded cities constitute the most magnificent material of our race. Yet under the present Government scheme the home contribution is only going to be, in 1923, £1,500,000. Surely it would be far better to spend more money on a scheme such as I am speaking of than to spend it on Governors' palaces, aerodromes, motor-cars and whatever they spend it on in these wildernesses, where the only crop we ever harvest is trouble. I trust, now that we have a Government in power which has always put Imperialism in the forefront of its programme, that it will justify that proud boast.

Another aspect to which I should like to draw the attention of the House is that there are two kinds of emigrants. There is the man who has had work in England and is now down and out, and who thinks that by emigrating he will find better fortune attending his efforts, and there is the young lad who has not been old enough to work, and proposes to emigrate for that very purpose to a new country. The former, of course, is much the more handicapped of the two. I think it was the late Prime Minister who was responsible for a scheme for settling ex-soldiers on the land. That seemed a very happy scheme to anybody who did not know very much about farming, but anybody who has had the experience knows that the best kind of farmer is the man who has lived all his life on the farm, who has been born and brought up on the farm, and holding that point in view, I say that you cannot emigrate these lads too young. That is the best scheme, and I congratulate the Government on having initiated that scheme, which is much the most feasible solution of the whole question. I also rejoice that that scheme has been received so enthusiastically overseas as it has. Sir Joseph Cook, the High Commissioner for Australia, said the other day: Platting (Mr. Clynes), in the same predicament, defended himself in this way. He said:

I have heard two criticisms passed by potential emigrants themselves, in the East End of London, on this scheme of emigration. One is that it is rather hard to expect a white Christian Englishman to emigrate while there are so many disreputable and disgusting aliens in our midst. That is one criticism levelled by the men themselves, and the other is that, if you go on with this scheme of emigration, you will denude England of its best, most enterprising and healthiest citizens. Neither of those arguments should carry much weight, because, in the first place, although I quite sympathise with the contention that there are too many aliens in our midst, however many Aliens Restriction Acts you pass you will always find the population is too great for these islands; and with regard to the country being denuded of enterprising, healthy citizens, I can only say that there are quite enough healthy, enterprising citizens to satisfy the needs both of the Mother Country and of the Empire. A taunt has not infrequently been levelled against those who advocate emigration as a solution of the problem of unemployment, that we do so actuated by the motive that the well-to-do wish to send into exile their less fortunate brethren, so that they themselves can have more elbow room in which to live in luxury. Ignoring that insinuation, I take exception to the word "exile." The notion that it is an exile to exchange life in the crowded cities of these islands for the great, open, sun-lit plains of the Colonies is a notion which, I trust, will disappear. I have never been to the Colonies myself. [An HON. MEMBER: "Your turn next!"] I think that is one of the arguments for dispensing with Autumn Sessions, that hon. Members would then have an opportunity to make themselves familiar with our Empire. I wish I had been to the Colonies. I have never been to Australia, but I am told by those who have that Australians, even those who have never seen the Mother Land, refer to England as "home." Is it too much to hope that that expression "home" will one day be used to designate comprehensively the whole of the British Empire, and that its populations will regard themselves and their lands not as separate entities, but as one State held together in the bond of kinship and commercial prosperity? In the days when I was what I might term a licensed eavesdropper behind your Chair, Mr. Speaker, I have listened to many Debates on many diverse subjects, but I know of no subject, not even excluding the War, which is of greater moment to us than the question of unemployment, and its kindred subjects about which I have been speaking. We have just had the Report of the Overseas Settlement Committee. I have not yet had time to examine it as I would wish to examine it. Although it reveals that much has been done in this direction, it also reveals that much remains to be done, and I do most earnestly and humbly press upon the Government not only the supreme importance of this subject, but also its supreme urgency.

It was somewhat surprising to find in the speech of the hon. and gallant Member who has just sat down many of the arguments which have been used on the opposite side against us in another way. There was the reference to the birth rate. Does the opposite side forget that, during the War, when they thought they would require bigger supplies of males, they encouraged breeding as far as possible, and, because it does not suit the British capitalists to have adolescents now, they want to tear them from their homes at years when parental responsibility is so much needed. They talk about the emigration of children. It is not emigration of children, but the tearing up of all that is true in the love between the mother and child. Then we are promised the care of the child in those far lands. What is the care to be? What is your control to be? The last speaker said he had never been in the Colonies. He does not grasp the distance between farm and farm and the hopeless proposition of being able to see that these children so deported are going to have the necessary protection.

On a point of Order—

I am not giving way.

The hon. and gallant Member said "a point of Order."

I did not hear him.

I think the hon. Member said that I did not realise the distance between farms, but I pointed out that—

That is an explanation, not a point of Order. May I ask the hon. Member to address me?

I will, Sir. This question of the emigration of children—

Young people.—[ Interruption. ]

Hon. Members have come here to listen to one another.

Hear, hear.

Listening is as important a part of the duties of Members as speaking; otherwise there can be no Debate.

The previous speaker referred to the conditions that might have obtained had we not had the great War. He insinuated that it would have been necessary to develop conditions to kill off the surplus of those who could be employed. The brutality contained in the remarks, and the insinuations that these benches contain the men who were in favour of doing it at one time and then forgetting it at another is absolutely false. The right of every child born into this world is a divine one—the right to live. It is no fault of the child if it happens to be born in poor surroundings. Why should the child of the poor be denied access to that which is its divine right because of the stupidity of our present commercial, capitalistic system? We on these benches deny the right of men to claim for themselves the name of Christian and acting like pagans. No more pagan speech could be delivered than the speech we have just heard. Then the hon. and gallant Member referred to what might be done by the application of science to barren wastes. That is true especially in Scotland, where we have the grandson of a man who was responsible for the Sutherlandshire clearances so that men could not even live upon the land where they were born. It is those on the opposite benches, or their class, who are responsible for the conditions to-day. By the application of science certainly this country to-day could be made absolutely independent of other nations. Even the presence of what is called the alien, from the Christian point of view on the other side, does not seem to permit of calling a human being of another race anything but something that is vile and ugly, and a person with whom contact is not to be suffered. Speaking of the application of science, let me read these headings from a newspaper a few days ago.

A report has just been issued in Glasgow showing that the conditions of some of our children there is approaching the state in which the children of Vienna were in 1920.

I would draw the attention of the Prime Minister especially to this Glasgow question. We see the ratepayers' money being spent upon the question as to whether the education authority or the parish council shall rate, despite the face that the same man has to pay all the time. Why all this legal expenditure? Is this done, and are Bills drawn up with a view to making fees for lawyers? No one has mentioned the great saving upon our railways through the combination of companies. Why did not the Government put up some defence because the £20,000,000 said to be saved is not percolating through for the benefit of trade and industry, but is finding its way mostly in the direction of increasing salaries of a handful of officials in these companies? We have a case in Glasgow of one man's salary being increased to £8,000. Yet we have in the Division I come from thousands of railwaymen always on the verge of what is called in Glasgow toppling over between being able to pay the grocer and not being able to pay him. Even with the achievements of science you cannot apply accountancy to wipe out all these things that stand to-day between public bodies and such cities as Glasgow.

Reference was made yesterday to the Royal birth. We on these benches welcome all births; we welcome all marriages. Why should the House have its attention specially drawn to one birth? There are as good children and as good parents everywhere throughout our Empire. I would say more. It would be much better to recognise the birth of a producer than the birth of someone who is going to live upon the produce of labour. We have thousands of young men and women unemployed at an age when they should be able to get married if they so desire. They are denied the right to-day because of economic conditions, and we know the horrible results that follow. But even these poor people are to be taxed in order to pay £500 to another couple who are going to breed at leisure. They will have plenty of leisure. If it had been the case that we could not go on without a supply of that type one might have understood the argument. That those concerned are to live upon the produce of those who are working for it is not going to make this nation greater or better. When the Government realises that it is desirable to compliment all births then it will be getting down to the principle of the thing, and you will get to the real basis on which you are going to build up capable men and women.

There was something said yesterday by the hon. Member for Gillingham (Mr. Hohler). I do not know whether he is here or not now, but last Session he put forward a suggestion—and I had to call him learned, I do not know why—because he might have given from his great stores of knowledge something that would have directed the House. Yesterday he was speaking from the benches opposite and he complained that nothing was said from these benches about the reconstruction of industry. We cannot help it if hon. Gentlemen opposite cannot understand. But you have on those benches opposite men who are financially in control, manufacturers of the steel in this country, why do not they introduce a new direct process? There are no cheers for that statement! Why do not they, if they have so much knowledge, give us some of that great knowledge and of the power which they possess, so that we may know how to improve industry? All, however, they are interested in is the reduction of the wages of the working men. They see no way of returning trade to its normal unless by a reduction of wages! We have one of those things called—as a nickname—a lord, Lord Weir. He tries to talk to us about relativity. He is a man of no knowledge of science. His remarks on relativity—or of whoever had written the letter for him—showed that he had not the ability to grasp even simple mathematics. He says: "We are not responsible for unemployment." No? It is the Liberal and Tory Governments of the past who have brought about the conditions under which we are suffering to-day, and it is for you on the opposite benches to rectify the mess you have made, or to clear out, and leave it to others who can do it.

I hope the House will grant me that indulgence that is always granted to the maiden speech of a new Member. It is a most awful ordeal to go through. I can only speak as a very ordinary Member of the House, and a very young Member. Still, I think I can give the opinion of a lot of other young Members on one or two of the points which were debated in the last Session, and have so far been debated in this: that perhaps might not be a bad thing. Personally, I am not what an hon. Member the other day called a pre-historic Member, nor am I a useless capitalist who never does any work and lives on the labour of others. I do a good deal of work besides my work in this House. Touching that, I do not see why all people who have money should always be called useless and and be told that they do no work. Personally, I think much work has been done by millionaires in the past, and in the present, and if the hours they work were shown to a trade union official he would have a fit.

Oh, no! I sometimes work 20 hours a day.

They have to work to get the wealth they have, and I say more power to their arm in doing it! I should just like to mention one or two things about the speech of the last speaker. In the first place, he mentioned War Bonds, and asked why could we not reduce the interest, as we were so pleased with the Americans reducing their interest on their loan to us. If we did, we would not only hit the rich people but a lot of other people. There are perhaps a good many people who would not be averse to accepting a lower rate of interest if such a proposal would hit everybody else. A great many people, not very rich, who invested money in War Bonds, would be very badly hit if the interest on the War Bonds were suddenly cut down. That is one point. The other point is that they bought these War Bonds on a guarantee from the British Government, and if the Government gave a guarantee it has got to stick to it, or otherwise its credit will go straight away. The only other point in that speech was that in which the hon. Member criticised the mention of the Royal birth. We on this side of the House, while partly agreeing in theory with him, look to His Majesty as being the head of the State, and as such we are always interested in anything that happens to him or his family. Therefore, when anything like this happens we are pleased to give him congratulations as being the head of our State.

I would just like to say one or two words on unemployment. From the opposite benches during the Election, and lately it has been said that the Government have done absolutely nothing, are doing absolutely nothing, and are going to do nothing. We entirely disagree. During the Election—I can speak for myself and others—we laid down definitely what our policy was on unemployment. We said that we considered the problem could only be solved by measures which would increase the trade of the country, and that by that alone could any real solution to the problem be found. It was pointed out yesterday that the unemployed figure has gone down by 500,000. A speaker on the other side queried that figure, and said he was certain the figures could not be accurate in view of the source from which they came. But these are the very figures which hon. Members opposite have been quoting against us the whole time; so why should they not be accurate now that they are going down? I told the people in my constituency, when speaking of unemployment, that I considered that trade was the only solution, and that that solution would be very slow indeed. The measures we promised to put in hand have been put in hand and are being put in hand now. There were three candidates in my constituency—it was a three-cornered fight, Liberal, Labour, and myself. The Liberal candidate put his point of view as to unemployment in very much the same way as I did. We polled 20,000 against 6,000. That would appear to show that the working classes are not entirely in agreement with the Socialist organisation, or think that a Socialist policy is the only one.

The question came up yesterday of the surplus population. Emigration was mentioned. It was mentioned to-day by the hon. and gallant Member for Reading (Major Cadogan). The Leader of the Opposition told us that we always said that there was a surplus population, that we intended to cut it off from the bottom, and that he intended to cut it off at the top. As a matter of fact, we have no such intention as that which he attributed to us in respect to emigration. I am a great believer in it if we can get a good and workable scheme. We want to see people from all classes emigrate, the rich, the middle classes, and the poor. Only by that particular system can it really be a success, for, after all, in my opinion, the employer cannot get on without the employé, nor can the employé get on without the employer, so if you have to emigrate a body of people, you must emigrate them all together. We were told, when Parliament was prorogued before Christmas, that it was shown, by the fact that there was going to be a Recess, that Members on this side of the House were completely indifferent to the sufferings of the unemployed. I should like to draw the attention of certain hon. Members to the fact that, at the very beginning of the Session, their own leader asked when the Session was likely to be over, and when he was told, he said, "that for his part, the sooner the better," as we were all tired, and he wanted the Recess as much as anybody else. That is the very thing. It is all very well to pass these pious resolutions saying that the fact that the House has been prorogued shows that the Government cares nothing for the unemployed, but how can you reconcile the two statements? Just one word as regards the hunger marchers. Last night an hon. Member who spoke from this side stated that, in his opinion, it was pure Socialist propaganda, and on that an hon. Member from the other side of the House drew attention to the circular issued by the Ministry of Health, to the effect that unemployed hunger marchers should be discouraged, because they did no good, but were altogether mischievous. The other side say they are genuine representatives of the unemployed movement. Why then, if that be so, when they call for hunger marchers, do they put into their circular that the marchers who come on this march must be strong men—I do not disagree with that—and class conscious.

Hear, hear!

Why class conscious? What would happen if an unemployed man came and said he wanted to march to London but that he had no Socialist pretensions, who said that he had not ever belonged to the Labour party, or the Communist party? Hon. Members know that the movement is entirely or very much Communist. A great many of these marchers have the little red stars which are so popular in Russia. They wear them. They call themselves "comrade this and that," and say out and out that they are Communist. It seems to me that the Communists and the Labour party are getting closer and closer. I can tell you of one little thing which occurred in my own constituency. I received a letter headed "The Communist Party of Great Britain." There was a printed heading with a letter inside. There was a blank space in order to put in the name of the branch, and the address of the branch was the local Labour party. That shows how very close they are to each other.

May I just say one word before I conclude on the occupation of the Ruhr by the French? We were told yesterday that there were only three alternatives before us. We could either go with France and march into the Ruhr, break entirely with France, or do exactly what we have done. If we were to go with France I am perfectly certain that many in this House, and a great many in Great Britain, would have a lot to say about it. There is another thing. We were told by our experts that if we did go with France we should not get reparation any more quickly, and, therefore, it was not our policy to do so. What is the feeling in respect to France? I wonder if people realise what tremendous bonds there are between the British people and the French—I mean individually? People who fought in France and who have sons and brothers who fought in France really have a tremendous sympathy and feeling of friendliness towards France. It does not matter whether they are the highest or the lowest in the land. The very thought of breaking with France is abhorrent to them. They really have this very deep affection, and I am sure that, if we were to break with France, we should have very serious trouble in this country in consequence.

Hon. Members opposite who are so frightfully anxious that the German worker and the individual in Germany should not be hurt are, for the most part, to be found amongst those who refused to fight for us with France against Germany and during the War were nearly always found rather sympathising with Germany than with us, and I do not think that fact has been lost on the people of this country and will not be lost when they read our proceedings in this House. I have put very shortly before the House what a very ordinary Member, and what a lot of very ordinary people think on these subjects. I am continually talking to people about these questions, and they give me their ideas upon them, and what I have stated I am convinced is what the majority of the people of Great Britain think on those particular questions.

I am rather afraid that the hon. Member for Springburn (Mr. Hardie) has wholly misinterpreted the meaning and the spirit of the speech which has been made this afternoon by the hon. and gallant Member for Reading (Major Cadogan). What was his purpose? The hon. and gallant Member said that before the War, even in a boom time, we had 200,000 men wholly unemployed, and he concluded, for various reasons which he gave, that if we did not look out when we got back to good times we should still have a permanent unemployed problem to deal with far beyond that which he mentioned. My hon. Friends on the Labour benches may say that they have a remedy, but I do not agree with them, and I think that they will be seriously mistaken as to the effect of their proposals. The fact is that in a boom time before the War, when things were supposed to be going well, we had 200,000 men unemployed, and on that calculation we may assume that the number is going to be at least 600,000. I think that is a short summary of the case.

The reasons given by the hon. and gallant Member included the increase in population, the cessation of emigration, and other things. I may point out that there are at the present moment many women permanently engaged in industry who were not so engaged before the War. These and other things go to prove that we shall have a very grave state of things in regard to permanent unemployment, very much greater than was the case before the War. We have been told that we must look ahead. I think hon. Members will agree that there are lots of things which will have to be done, but the hon. and gallant Member takes out one and one only and that is the distribution of the man power of the Empire.

I agree that on the question of emigration there is a great prejudice in the minds of the people against it, because people do not want to be torn away from all their old associations and friends and relatives in order to find a new fortune and a new home abroad. I think that prejudice is reasonable. It applies to all classes of the community. But, quite apart from the sentimental reason, there is good reason why there should be some prejudice in the minds of the working classes with reference to the way emigration has been worked in the past. There is good reason, at the other end of the scale, in the Dominions as to the expediency of adopting this policy. At any rate, we have now lifted the problem up to an entirely better plane by the passing of the Empire Settlement Act, and this has made things better at both ends of the line. That Act puts the question on an entirely different basis, making better arrangements at each end. It provides £1,500,000 which may be spent up to the 31st March this year, and it also provides for the spending, if necessary, of a further £3,000,000 a year for the next 15 years.

There are parts of the Empire which can be developed if the right sort of men are sent there. We have to-day among ex-service men 300,000 young fellows under 30 years of age who are unemployed. They are first-class material and are capable of being made into first-class citizens, but continued unemployment—some of them have been unemployed for two years—is steadily reducing their moral, and if we do not take the thing up with courage we shall lose our opportunity. If we do not deal with this problem, you will not only have 200,000 men unemployed in good times, but you are going to have three times as many. Here is a chance to do something. Here you have 300,000 ex-service men unemployed. It is no fault of ours that they are unemployed, and all the Socialist remedies in the world would not have altered that fact. Time is going on. These men are steadily becoming more demoralised through lack of regular work, and here is a fine chance to do something for them. In my view no man can call himself a friend of these men if he says to them, "I do not think this offer is good enough for you."

I know what has been done on this subject by the Commonwealth Government, the New Zealand Government and several other States, and I want an assurance that this thing is going to be carried through. During the War we took lots of these young fellows into infantry camps and after 13 weeks of intensive training we turned them into the greatest war machine that the world has ever seen. If these men wish to go, why should we not let them go abroad? The Dominions require vigorous sturdy men with some knowledge of agricultural processes, and why should we not place these ex-service men in camps and train them with a happier and better objective than we did in the War, because at the other end of the line there is health and strength and happiness for them. On the other hand, if these men stay here, there is only failure and disaster confronting many of them, and I am sure they deserve so much better than that at our hands.

I wish to address myself to an observation which fell from the lips of the hon. and gallant Member for East Islington (Captain Hudson), because he and others are mistaken in assuming that we on these benches lack consideration for the happy couple who are about to enter into wedlock, or for the child who has just been ushered into this world. On the contrary, we have the utmost consideration for them, but on broad grounds of social justice and morality we urge a wider distribution of those comforts which they are at present enjoying, and which I hope they will continue to enjoy. I would say to hon. Members opposite that what you ask for your own class you cannot deny to the class we represent. I know this is a side issue, and I would be the last person to divert the attention of the House at a time of national crisis, for, indeed, we are confronted with a crisis to-day as great as we have known for some years.

During yesterday's Debate and the Debates in the short Session before Christmas, we demanded from the Government and from hon. Gentlemen opposite, having regard to their superiority in numbers, that they should tabulate constructive proposals for dealing with these great problems. We have had in these Debates an example of the formulation of what are believed to be constructive proposals placed before the House. What are they? It is suggested that we should send out of this country, young men, and perhaps middle-aged men and women also, who may be regarded as useless from the point of view of the productive capacity of this country and send them to different parts of the Empire overseas. When we express our abhorrence of ideas of that kind, we are told, as we have been told by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for North-West Camberwell (Dr. Macnamara) that we are prejudiced.

4.0 P.M.

As a matter of fact, we are not by any means prejudiced against emigration. If men and women desire to go abroad to any part of our Dominions, we express no objection whatever, and if we can assist those who desire to go abroad, either financially or otherwise, we are quite willing to do so. We do not, however, regard that as a solution of the unemployed problem, or, indeed as a solution of any of our social problems. When hon. Members say that in this country there is no room for the population, that we cannot find any use for their productive power which is undoubtedly considerable, and that we cannot provide them with the things they desire, that is a confession not only of economic impotence, but of national desire. The hon. and gallant Member for Reading (Major Cadogan) was good enough to inform the House that he had never been in Australia. That was obvious from some of the observations which fell from his lips. I should imagine from what he said that he has not been in many parts of England, because I am of opinion—and perhaps hon. Members who have much more knowledge, geographically, of the subject than I have will correct me if I am wrong—that in this country there could be a more equitable distribution of the men on the land, thereby stimulating the productive power of those who are placed on the land and so utilising to the full the available resources of the country I am at one with the right hon. Gentleman the Member for North West Camberwell when he says that it will be exceedingly difficult to provide employment for the available population for a good many years, if indeed at all. I go further and say that in some occupations it will never be possible to absorb all those who are at present unemployed. But there are remedies. They may, as hon. Members have said, be socialist remedies, but you must not be prejudiced. You must consider them fairly. If there be anything in them, as we believe, then let us consider them dispassionately, and perhaps we may reach a common solution.

The problem is aggravated, and is being steadily and constantly aggravated, by the introduction of labour-saving appliances, and, still more, by the repeated and asiduous attempts of what I term benevolent employers, but whom we sometimes regard as otherwise, to increase the working day. If you want temporarily to solve the unemployment problem, then reduce the hours of employment. I say "temporarily" advisedly, because it is no constant and lasting solution. Then we come to the question of emigration. There are great practical difficulties in the way. Where are you going to send your social outcasts, for that is how you have described them? [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] If there be no place for them in this country, they are outcasts. If they be not outcasts, then provide for them. You can have it either way. If no work can be found for men and women in this country, no reasonable living and no domestic comfort, then, obviously, you must regard those persons as being ostracised and social outcasts. Where do you propose to send them? I happen to have had some experience in the shipping industry, and I know from my experience and from conversations with those engaged in the industries and with men who are constantly going abroad and coming from countries beyond the seas, that there is in the large industrial centres in the Dominions as much unemployment, comparatively, as there is in the large industrial centres in this country. You may send your young men below 30 years of age to Sydney and Melbourne, but they have there their unemployment problem. [An HON. MEMBER: "And Labour Government!"] If hon. Members will interrupt, they will hear the truth. There is no Labour Government in that country at the present time. There will be a Labour Government there some day, and, probably, in consequence of that fact, there will be a solution of some of the problems which are engaging attention to-day. We have to face the fact that in Melbourne and Sydney to-day, and possibly for some time to come, there is an unemployment problem, and there are there precisely the same social evils with which we are faced here in this country. Where, then, do you pro- pose to send them? If you propose to send them into the agricultural or potential agricultural districts of Australia, then, obviously, you must select the right type of person to be successful, and, if you are going to pick and choose, as inevitably you must, in order to achieve success, then you are going to draw from the best in this country. I suggest that that, instead of solving your social problems, is likely to aggravate them.

I join issue at once with those who desire to take from this country, which is not yet fully developed, either in an agricultural or social or economic sense, the very best of our men and send them abroad. You are not entitled to adopt an expedient of that kind until you have adopted other expedients which can be more easily applied. If you go to Canada you will find that there are hundreds of men leaving Montreal, Quebec, and other large industrial centres and coming to this country. The great trans-Atlantic liner companies make a comfortable living because of the constant stream of emigrants to other countries and of the return of others to this country. That is constantly going on, and, of course, it is not a solution of the problem. If we wished to apply our minds in a constructive fashion to the problem of unemployment, we should see how far it is possible here in this country to solve the problem without going to the Dominions overseas.

I would like to make one or two suggestions. First of all, I suggest that we shall inevitably be compelled to transfer large numbers of our working population from industries like coalmining, shipbuilding, and engineering particularly, to agriculture, and that is by no means so easy as it may appear. I should have assumed that hon. Members opposite would have regarded it as very easy, because they speak so glibly of the development of agriculture and what it is possible to do in that direction. I suggest, therefore, that we should set up agricultural colonies or farms where men and women can be trained at the expense of the nation and become fitted to engage in agriculture at an early date. That is one method of approach to a solution of the problem. There is, however, much more than that to be done. We ought to adopt what may be termed a national spring cleaning. In times of domestic leisure we engage in what is termed spring cleaning in our houses, and in times of enforced national leisure, such as we have to-day, there must be a complete reconstruction of the country. Our roads, our railways, electricity, and our housing question—all these offer a partial if not a complete solution of the problem, and along that road we are bound to go if we propose to tackle this question in the way that it ought to be tackled. Hon. Members opposite are fond of jeering Members on this side of the House because of our so-called extreme views. We have Members like the hon. Member who spoke from the back Bench opposite telling us that millionaires, in his judgment, are useful. Our reply is that their usefulness is not consistent with their wealth and position in the country. We are not so foolish as to say that millionaires, not as millionaires but as men, are not useful. Millionaires, as men, may be exceedingly useful, but, as millionaires, they are of no value at all to modern civilisation. That is the whole point. However extreme you may regard our views, unless you are prepared to usher in gradual changes leading up to a fundamental change, then you may tinker with the problems which confront you to-day but you will reach no solution of them. Instead of solving your problems, you will merely be sending 100,000, 200,000, or 300,000—that is by no means an easy task—of our best manhood and womanhood abroad and piling up the profits of the shipping companies. I am not at all sure that is not the motive behind the suggestion. By sending these men and women out you will be assisting in the exploitation of the natural resources of Australia, Canada and Africa and in the immoral exploitation of the men and women working and living in those countries. That is exactly what is going to follow from your emigration proposals. I know people outside connected with capitalist commercial undertakings view with very great concern the higher wages which obtain in Australia as compared with those paid in this country. They frequently comment on them. If you are going to send large numbers of the population abroad to work in competition with men and women in those countries, obviously it is going to be an advantage to the capitalists of those countries. Hon. Members, of course, deny that they have any desire to do such an immoral thing. They are constantly denying these things, but, at the same time, they are doing them. We have the facts before us. We know precisely what is going on and what is likely to occur. By all means send people abroad if they desire to go, but do not expect to solve the problem in that way here at home. It is likely rather to aggravate the evil if you send too many of the best men and women of this country away from the homeland.

I do not propose to follow the last speaker in his arguments on the question of unemployment beyond making one or two remarks. He suggested that the transfer of a large number of men now engaged in coal mining, shipbuilding and other industries to the land. I wonder whether he knows much about coal mining. I imagine he does not. But there are Members sitting on the benches opposite who will agree with me when I say that if you are going to ask miners suddenly to become agricultural labourers, if you are going to ask men who have for generations been working in the coalfields to turn to agriculture, you will find it a very difficult task to carry out such a proposal. I invite the hon. Member to give up theories of this nature and to get back to realities. Suppose you do take a miner and teach him to plough and sow and do other agricultural work. When you have taught him, where are you going to find him a job? [An HON. MEMBER: "On the land!"] I do not think the hon. Member who makes that interjection can have had any practical experience. I say with all deference to hon. Members opposite that since Mr. George Edwards, at one time Member for South Norfolk, ceased to be a Member of this House there has been no practical agriculturist, in the true sense of the word, sitting on the Labour benches. I ask hon. Members to realise that in dealing with agricultural questions there can be no advantage in transferring men from other industries to the land. When dealing with the land question it is necessary to get back to practical politics. If the hon. Member's suggestion were at all feasible I would back it with all my heart. But I must point out to him that there are agricultural colleges already in existence where fruit culture and corn growing are taught and where experiments in order to develop the science of agriculture are carried on. To set up, as he suggests, at the expense of the State, large colleges which could be of no effect at all, from his point of view, unless thousands of men could be trained in them is impossible, and affords no solution of the present difficulty of unemployment. The suggestion shows that the hon. Member does not understand the practical side of agriculture.

There are one or two observations I wish to make with reference to the Gracious Speech from the Throne. We welcome most heartily the references in that Speech to the subject of agriculture, and especially to the question of trade facilities with a view to helping agriculture. I would ask the House to consider for one moment what is the condition of the bulk of the farmers in this country to-day. They have had to sell their corn at prices which could not pay them. They have sold their Christmas stock and probably have not made much money out of it. They cannot sell their potatoes except at a total loss. That is the situation with which the bulk of agriculturists in this country are faced to-day. The time is coming when work on the farms will have to be developed. They will require more money, but they have it not, and cannot get it; therefore, if the Government are going to deal with the question of credit facilities, let it do so as quickly as possible in order that more men may be employed on the land. This cannot be done unless the farmers have capital in hand. The Government have said that they are considering the whole agricultural question. They must know the very serious crisis through which agriculture is now passing. There is no capital in the land. The capital has gone and as a result the farmers are in a most extraordinarily difficult position. Take the position of the labourer himself. I hope to see published very shortly the Report on Retail and Wholesale Prices, because there is no comparison whatever between the retail prices paid for the various articles of food needed by the agricultural labourer—bread, bacon and beer—and the wholesale prices. The prices operate against the consumer at the present time, and therefore I hope that the Report on this subject will be published as soon as possible, so that the prices of these articles, so vital to the life of the people, may be more equalised as between the retailer and the wholesaler than they are to-day.

It is promised that attention will be given to the question of local taxation. We quite realise that that is a very difficult and complex subject, and we hope the Government will deal with it earnestly and seriously. When its proposals are introduced I ask hon. Members in every quarter of the House to consider them, not from the point of view of town versus country, but to look at them from the point of view that agriculture is undoubtedly bearing an unfair share of the burden of local taxation to-day and is not asking anything unfair from the urban population. It is only asking that the rating shall be placed on a just basis and that in that respect it shall be placed in the position to which it is entitled. I hope that in the coming Session this subject will be dealt with effectively.

There is one other subject which affects the county in which I live, the county of Kent, and various other counties where hops are grown. The plight of agriculture as a whole is bad, but the position of the hop industry is acute. I hope hon. Members will bear with me while I give a few facts in regard to the hop industry. The situation is this. During the War, owing to the necessities of the case, the hop acreage had to be cut down from 35,000 acres to 15,000 acres. It was necessary to make that reduction, and the hop growers carried it out. I would remind the House that prior to the War the annual cost of an acre of hop land was not much less than £60, of which 40 per cent. went in wages. Therefore, hon. Members will realise what a considerable sacrifice of capital the hop growers had to make when, in the public interest, they grubbed-up this large acreage of hop land. As the House will remember, a system of control was set up which did not cost the country a penny. It was a system of control set up as between the grower, the factor and the brewer, and the basis of it was the ascertainment of the cost of cultivating the hops. When the figures had been arrived at the price of the hops to the brewer was fixed by the Controller with a view to securing a fair return to the grower for his outlay. The cost of cultivating hops per acre went up to over £140 per annum. There was a feeling of confidence that the industry would supply the hops necessary for the beer of the country and that therefore it had a chance of developing. But what has occurred? The consumption of beer has fallen. It is estimated that for this year it will only represent something like 18,000,000 barrels. I am not grumbling at that, but inasmuch as it is calculated that 1,000 acres of hops are necessary to produce 1,000,000 barrels of beer, if only 18,000,000 barrels of beer are to be produced this year it necessarily follows that the produce of only 18,000 acres of hops will be required. At the present time, however, there are 27,000 acres of hops under cultivation, and it is employing this very large amount of capital of which 60 per cent. is spent in labour.

Owing to foreign hops coming in under licence the producer of hops in this country who has expended this large amount of money is now only getting from the Hop Controller cheques to the extent perhaps of 5 per cent. of the value of his crops, and he cannot therefore meet his bills. I have letters here from firms who supply manures stating that they cannot get payment from the hop grower, because the Hop Controller is unable to dispose of the hops and cannot therefore hand the money over to the grower. The result is that the industry is threatened with stagnation and bankruptcy. I am not asking that this question of an extension of control should be dealt with here, but this industry, as I would ask the hon. Member who spoke last to realise, does employ more labour per annum than any other agricultural industry, and the amount laid out per acre is greater than in any other industry. There may, of course, be people who wish to kill the industry, but, unless something is done for it, it cannot go on, because of these large sums of money which are at present tied up in it and which the grower cannot get. The result is that the manufacturer, in turn, cannot get his money from the grower, and so the whole matter is in a most chaotic state. If the House desires to encourage employment in agriculture, I would ask whether it would not be worth while to consider a duty on foreign imported hops, to the extent of keeping out those hops if it is found that our own industry can supply the Market, under control, at such a price that there can be no inflation of profit, but simply a fair return to the producer for his outlay.

I ask the House to give serious consideration to an industry such as this, in which there is a large amount of capital which can be saved by a moderate duty on foreign imported hops, not put on with any object of raising prices, but simply to preserve an industry which does, undoubtedly, employ a very large amount of labour, and would continue to do so if it had a chance, but which at the present moment is in the most chaotic state of any portion of our agricultural industry, difficult as the situation of other portions of that industry is. It is a question of bread and butter to many working men, and it is for that reason that I have ventured to bring it before the House. In conclusion, I would say once more that we welcome what has been said on behalf of agriculture in the King's Speech, but we do urge on the Government that it is vitally necessary that whatever is to be done should be done quickly. Otherwise, the problem will only get worse. We are coming to a period of the year when more capital is wanted if the land is to be cultivated as it should be. The average farmer has not the capital, and I hope the Government will see that he gets it on easy terms, so that he can employ the labour which we all wish to see employed.

One more new Member claims the indulgence of the House, and I am sure that I shall receive it. I am sent here by an agricultural constituency, and if I did not lay before the House the terrible straits of that industry by which we get our living, and in particular the poor and low wages of the agricultural labourer in my division to-day, I should be failing in my duty. I agree with the hon. and gallant Member who spoke last in what he said as to credit facilities for the farmer. They are much needed. The farmers in my part of the country have lost a great deal, in fact all, of the money that they made during the War, and they are financially in a bad state. I regret very much to see, from the next paragraph of the Gracious Speech, that the Government do not promise definitely what they will do with regard to rates. This is a burden on the land, and I happen to know a good deal about it, because I have been chairman of the Rates Committee in my district ever since there has been a Rates Committee there. The trouble with regard to rating really began in 1914, and I am bound to say that many hon. Members of this House were responsible for a good deal of the burden which is being put on the land in that direction. They had the Education Act, and then the Ministry of Transport, and the cost of education to the rates increased enormously, and also the cost of upkeep of the roads.

I do not want the House to think that I do not believe in education. I believe it to be the duty of the country to provide the best education that it is possible to provide for everyone, but I say that it is a national and not a local matter. I will give only one instance. In my own little town of 4,000 or 5,000 inhabitants, I am proud to say we had five boys who took their degrees at the University at the last examination, and all of those boys came from small homes. Good, therefore, is being done. But those boys are not going to stay in agriculture; they are going into the towns, and rightly so. We have paid for that, however, and I say that the charge should be a national charge, and that the agricultural industry should not be burdened by such a heavy rate as the education rate is to-day. Again, with regard to roads, hon. Members who live in large towns will hardly believe me when I tell them that, on the Great North Road near to where I live, farmers cannot turn their horses on to the road because of its slippery nature. At the beginning, the roads were constructed for the people who lived near them. If it is necessary now that they should be used by motor vehicles, let the State, by taxing motor vehicles and those who use them, pay for the roads. I had an unfortunate experience myself while riding along one of these beautiful roads. My horse fell, and I lay with my head cut open for about an hour before I came to.

There is one other question that I must bring before the House, namely, the question of smallholdings. In my Division there are quite a number of smallholdings. In fact, I believe that there are more soldiers on the land in my Division than in any other, with the exception of the Holland Division. I am bound to admit that the Minister of Agriculture has lowered the rents. Since I asked for it in the House last Session, there has been a steady inquiry into the condition of these men, and the rents have been lowered. There is, however, a much greater evil than the rents, namely, the fact that these men, when they enter upon a smallholding of 40 acres, are charged with an inventory of £700 at 5 per cent. They can never make a living so long as they are under that burden. I hope the Minister will carefully inquire into the inventory question in these cases, because I am sure he will find that a great injustice has been done to these men, and that they can never make a living so long as they have to pay that amount. I remember, at the time when I first came into the House, going to an agricultural committee meeting, where we were told that, the last Parliament having pledged their word to Canada in regard to the embargo, we were bound to keep that pledge. It appeared to me that, if we had to keep our word to Canada, we should be more careful to keep it to our people at home. We all know how agriculture was betrayed.

There is another aspect of the question. Since I came into the House I have had to vote against the Safeguarding of Industries Act, and I shall continue to do so. I was told during the Debate that these industries were essential to the country during war-time; but if the German submarine warfare had commenced at the beginning of the War, I would ask the House what would have been the most essential industry of this country? Would it not have been agriculture, whereby we could have lived? If we were not prepared to safeguard the one industry which is the most essential in this country, I am not prepared to safeguard the dyestuffs or any other industry. I am not a Protectionist, but a Free Trader; but if agriculture, which is an essential industry to the nation, is in such a bad state that it must be spoon-fed for a time to enable it to get over its difficulties, I see no reason why grants should not be made in aid, not by taxation of imports, but in other directions, until that emergency is over. Before I sit down I should like to say that the ordeal has not been quite so severe as I might have expected, and I hope that the next time I get up I shall take up more of the time of the House.

I crave the indulgence of the House while I emphasise some few of the points which have been submitted for its consideration, and which have been so eloquently and forcibly made by the hon. Member who has just held the attention of the House. The present position of agriculture is, as has been stated, a very parlous one. The industry is suffering largely because of the rapid fall in the prices of agricultural commodities, and there has not been at the same time and in the same ratio a corresponding fall in the cost of producing those commodities. One reason for this rapid fall, and one which is not generally referred to, is the effect of the American exchange in relation to sterling. A state of balance and equilibrium within a matter of 3 or 4 per cent. has now been reached in that exchange, but it has been reached very largely at the expense of the industry of agriculture. The low level of sterling as expressed in dollars raised prices, and particularly the prices of agricultural commodities, to a high level, and steps were taken, which I venture to think were courageous and proper steps, to bring about a readjustment of the exchange between England and America. Heavy taxes were imposed upon our people, and, as a result, the readjustment of the exchange has to a great extent been effected.

If the index figures for 1911 and 1913 be taken as 100, the figure in 1920 rose to 292. In 1922 it had fallen from 292 to 159, or 59 per cent. above the pre-War level. That was a remarkably rapid fall, and it has had, naturally and consequentially, a considerable effect on those engaged in the industry of agriculture, particularly as the price of agricultural produce in this country is not governed or reflected in any way by the cost of producing that produce, owing to the fact that, in the case, for instance, of wheat, meal and flour, 75 per cent. of our requirements are met by foreign imports. The difficulties with which the industry is now faced are in a great measure due to the rectification in exchange. The effect has been to force down the wages of the agricultural worker to a low level, and also to bring the occupier face to face with great difficulties. Four parties are interested in agriculture—the worker, the occupier, the owner of the land which is tilled, and, perhaps more than anyone else, the consumer of the produce of that land; and it is very important that the respective interests of those four parties should be faithfully dealt with and respected if justice is to be done.

The Gracious Speech forecasts that legislation will be introduced dealing with credit facilities and that there will be a reform in our local taxation. But these proposals do not in themselves go far enough, and many of us feel disappointed that more far-reaching proposals were not submitted. The success of any credit scheme which may be evolved will depend to a great extent on the rate of interest which is to be charged to those who make use of the facilities, and I should like to urge that the rate of interest should not be in excess of that which America is charging us for the money she lent us. I hope any fresh scheme may be a double-barrelled scheme and may be a short term as well as a long term credit scheme. The question of rating reform seems to me to break itself up into three separate heads. The first is in connection with national services, namely, that all national services which are now being paid for so largely out of the raw material of the agriculturist, the land, should as far as possible be paid for by national taxes. The second point is in relation to the basis of assessment, which urgently needs revision. The third is that the 1896 Act should be brought up to date. That is a form of relief not in itself very great but, at any rate, it will give an immediate small measure of relief, and I hope the question of bringing that Act up to date will receive close attention. I should also like to urge that there can be no satisfaction even to the rural dweller, and certainly none to the town dweller, if a policy of endeavouring to shift the rates from the shoulders of one set of ratepayers on to another is pursued, and I hope proposals which suggest a policy of that kind will not be submitted to the House. A suggestion which I think should be carefully considered is whether the flow of our imports cannot be adjusted so far as they relate to wheat and flour and meal so that it shall be in the form rather of wheat and grain than in the form of flour and meal. That would lead to a greater measure of employment and would not entail, so far as I can see, any measure of hardship.

We have heard a good deal from time to time about the need for improving transport in the country. We have heard a good deal regarding the value of light railways in rural districts. I believe in the 1921 Act, although provision is made for financing light railways, no Treasury facilities, in fact, exist, and I hope when the Estimates are submitted for next year credits will be provided for the development of light railways. It appears that the powers which this House has in connection with the rates charged by railway companies for the transport of produce are very limited. I should like it to be made clear that this House is prepared to consider the question of taking powers to deal with any excessive charges in that respect. Another matter, small in itself, but very irritating to the agriculturist, is the question of the provision of telephones at railway stations. Not only do railway companies in some cases refuse, and have power to refuse, to instal telephones, but they have even refused to do so when other people living in the district were prepared to find the money to pay for the installation. There is, too, the question of the development of roads in the Fen districts. There you have great areas of country eminently suitable in themselves for the system of intensive cultivation. The soil is of the right kind and the right texture, but the markets are distant and means of transport are not available. It is a matter for consideration whether some of these grants in respect of unemployment could not be used for providing metal for making proper roads across the Fen districts, helping to settle more smallholders on land suitable for small holdings and at the same time helping to deal with the unemployment question. There are many other matters which are not perhaps referred to, such as the question of cash on delivery. If we could get a system of cash on delivery it would help the small producer to market his produce and to get into closer and quicker touch with the town dweller. I feel, too, that the rural dweller should be catered for in other directions. Turning for a moment to the new wireless industry, we are told that people are not going to be allowed to have receiving sets if they serve a large number of people, but they will have to pay a special licence. That is hampering the development of this new service, and also doing a great deal to take it out of the reach of the rural dweller. I hope no dead paralysing hand of Government control will be placed on this new development, and that it will be made as available as possible to rural dwellers.

Allusion has been made to the question of beer, and I should like to submit that when the day comes when the remission of taxation is being considered, beer should stand high up on the list for consideration. Not only is it very hard for agriculturists, by reason of the low wages they have to submit to, that the price of beer is so high, but it injures the barley grower, and in that indirect way affects employment in the country districts. The same to a limited extent may be said in regard to the sugar duty. Last year there was a glut of fruit, and one of the reasons why it was so great was that the price of sugar was so high that there was a falling off in the amount of jam made in households throughout the country. I hope, therefore, that both beer and sugar will receive preference when the question of the remission of taxation comes up for consideration. Then there is the question of housing as affecting the rural dweller. I think a very considerable measure of simplification might be made in regard to the procedure which is now adopted in respect to housing. We do not want a lot of architects. We do not want elaborate plans. We have bodies like the building sub-committees of county councils, who are quite qualified to deal with plans and can look at a plan from the point of view of safety and sanitation and the other requirements of country districts, and if only some means could be devised by which the dole could be given in return for some building service, house rent could be reduced to the cost of the materials used in building the houses plus perhaps the labour employed in excess of the dole. Every burden which can be removed legitimately and properly from agriculture should be removed. Even now the rural population is smaller in relation to the total area of the country than in any other country, and it leads inevitably to over-crowding, slums, and economic and social evils which I need not discuss. It is easy to sit still and do nothing, and if nothing is done the occupier of the land will inevitably resort to his own remedy. In 1922 the arable land of the country was reduced by no less than 308,000 acres and permanent pasture was increased by 189,000 acres. If it con- tinues again for the present year at the same rate as last year, we shall reach the 1914 figure, and if it exceeds last year's rate we shall be at a lower level of cultivation than we have yet known in our history. What that means the agricultural labourer and others who live in the country know well. Arable land requires for adequate cultivation, if it is heavy land, at least three men to the hundred arable acres, while grass at the most only requires one man per hundred acres, and if this policy continues these men will come crowding into the towns and the cities in competition for such work as there is available, and will make the state of unemployment worse still.

5.0 P.M.

There is a diversity of opinion on the Government Benches regarding the advisability of setting people to work on the land. We were told yesterday that it was impossible to make an agriculturist in two or three years, and yet the suggestion is made to-day that we should give facilities for the development of small holdings. It is quite possible that you can get men who are prepared to tackle work on a small holding after having received three or six months' training, as was the case with ex-service men under the Government scheme at the conclusion of the War, and I have no doubt it can be argued from the other side of the House that the proof that an agriculturist could not be turned out in that time is to be seen in the failure of many of these ex-service men to make good. Failure to make good in agriculture in a small way is perhaps due to lack of credits. The hon. Member who just sat down appeals to the Government to give credits where they are required on terms no higher than those we are asked to pay to America. That again cuts the other way. It cuts at War Loan. If you are going to do that it is quite right that you should ask those who lent their money when good interest could be got, and who are now benefiting abnormally, to be cut down to the same figure. The hon. Member who has just sat down said that the rural population is out of proportion to the population of the cities and towns. We agree with that statement. We have been urging that instead of indulging in schemes of emigration to get rid of the alleged surplus population—a surplus which is by no means proved—we should adopt methods by means of which we could keep our population at home. The surplus population is proved so far as the present state of affairs is concerned and so far as the present methods of conducting industry and agriculture are concerned, but it is not proved that we have in this country a population greater than we could support if we adopted entirely different methods. There are those who draw excessive tributes from the production of our people and who cause tendencies which prevent production from time to time, but it does not follow that because they do that, that there is a surplus population which this country could not maintain. Our point of view is, that if we adopted new methods, shorter hours of labour as a temporary expedient, we should absorb large numbers of the present unemployed. If we set out to provide our people with all they required for life we could absorb our unemployed, without regard to someone making a profit out of it.

I am not chiefly concerned in boosting the development of agriculture, or indulging in any general attack on the existing system of society. What I am chiefly concerned about at the moment is the question of emigration, particularly the question of juvenile emigration. Last Session I raised this question in the Debate on unemployment, and drew attention to the tragedy of the unemployed juveniles. On that occasion, however, I got no satisfaction. I got no assurance that anything would be done to deal with the unemployed juveniles. It was only after the House had been in Recess a fortnight or so that we were informed that the Cabinet had decided to establish training colleges, or had invited the local education authorities to set up training colleges for the training of boys and girls, and, further, to develop schemes of emigration for taking the surplus juvenile population from this country. That is significant to a new Member who comes into this House innocent in some respects—I am not speaking sarcastically now—and believing that as a Member of Parliament he stands in something of a privileged position, and that, at least, he will get opportunities of knowing what is proposed to be done on behalf of the people whom he represents, in preference to the Press. We do not get that.

The first intimation that we as private Members received regarding the Cabinet's scheme for dealing with juvenile unemployment appeared in the Press. On seeing the announcement in the Press, I wrote to the Prime Minister, as one especially interested in the employment of juveniles, asking if he would see that I received particulars of the Cabinet's emergency scheme for dealing with the juvenile unemployed. I received an acknowledgment, with a statement that the matter would receive attention, but I have received no further communication. I wrote quite innocently as a private Member, thinking that if information was available for the Press, it could be equally available for a Member of this House, even though he be a Member of the Opposition. Apparently that is not so.

On the question of training for boys and girls, I am wholly dissatisfied with the scheme. It is totally inadequate. It does not meet the case, and particularly in regard to the girls it seeks to train them for a form of service for which they have shown no desire up to now, and in which there has been a shortage because of the unsatisfactory conditions in that line of employment. I am not going to deal with the educational side of the question so far as it affects juveniles who are to remain at home. I am chiefly concerned with the scheme for sending abroad boys between the ages of 14 and 17 years. There have been schemes of emigration on foot for many years by large institutions like Dr. Barnardo's Homes, under which boys and girls have been sent abroad in groups and trained for certain forms of work, and supervised for a certain period; but this is the first occasion on which there has been a definite Government scheme for emigrating British boys from their own homeland, even to a Dominion.

It is more necessary than ever that we should interest ourselves in this emigration scheme. If it is going to become one of the institutions of this country in the form of an Emigration Department for juvenile labour it is very necessary that we should see that the safeguards are as tight as they can possibly be. I am utterly opposed to the whole thing, as the most diabolical and abominable scheme ever introduced by a Government. If you consider it from the moral point of view you are bound to realise that. I agree with what has been said by the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Shinwell) that you are going to take boys and girls away from their homes and from home influence. You cannot deny that that has a bad moral effect. Hon. Members opposite may say that they are not being taken. It is true that in the scheme as laid down by the Ministry of Labour there are certain safeguards, one of which provides that the consent of the parents must first be obtained.

There is no use my going into details of the conditions prevailing to-day. There are 1,500,000 men and women and between 200,000 and 300,000 unemployed boys and girls between the ages of 14 and 17. These boys and girls have become disgusted. They have lost hope of fulfilling what they desired to do when they left school at the age of 14, namely, to become useful members of the community and earning members of their families. They have failed in that, and having lost what they believe is the right to a source of pocket money, which would be theirs if they were in employment, they are wholly disappointed. Their parents are in the same position, desperate as to their present condition, desperate as to their future, and not knowing what to do with them. Under conditions like these, under conditions of economic distress, it is proposed to approach the father and ask him to give his consent to his boy being taken overseas, perhaps on the application of the boy. The boy has lost the hope of gaining anything here, and he has what all natural, healthy boys must have, the spirit of adventure, and the desire to see other parts of the world. In view of these conditions there can be no doubt that consent will be obtained without there being really any free choice on the part of the parent. If there had been free choice and the possibility of maintaining the boy at home, the consent would in all probability not be given. That is taking a mean advantage of the subject.

It may be said that Empire development is necessary. Hon. Members opposite laughed when the hon. Member for Linlithgow assured them that we were not opposed to emigration, and not opposed to the development of the un-exploited parts of the earth. My hon. Friend spoke the truth. There are huge tracts of territory that could be brought under the control of man and made to satisfy the wants of man and to increase the supplies which we need. We are not opposed to these resources being developed, but we are opposed to the economic disabilities from which our people suffer being used as a whip to drive them there to do it. It is said by hon. Members on the other side that they are anxious for these overseas developments; but it is a strange circumstance that the hon. and gallant Member for Reading (Major Cadogan), who has spoken in support of the emigration scheme and Empire development, has never been in the Colonies and has no intention of going to the Colonies. He intends to remain here. It is our class which is to be sent out there, under the stress of economic disability. We object to that.

We are not opposed to men and women who are mature and capable of choosing for themselves and making up their minds whether they will go abroad to earn their livelihood and to take their chance of fortune or otherwise; but it must be a free choice. [HON. MEMBERS: "It is a free choice!"] It is not a free choice. I defy any hon. Member to prove that it is a free choice. If there is no employment at home and no possibility of employment at home for an individual within the limits of the present system, then there is no free choice. If it is a case of starvation or going abroad they will choose going abroad. When we state that we are not opposed to men and women who are of an age capable of exercising a free choice being able to exercise that choice, hon. Members opposite laugh.

My attitude towards the juvenile is that although you are taking these boys and girls with the consent of the parents, that consent has been wrung from the parents by the system which hon. Members opposite uphold. It is the present economic system which wrings from the parent consent that his boy or girl should depart from the family. It means taking away these young people at the most impressionable period of their lives. All the official circulars contain the statement that this is the most impressionable period of their lives. It is the most dangerous period at which you are going to take them away from all home influence. They are going to be sent overseas at an age when they are beginning to feel the urgings of instincts which have never troubled them up to that period, and at an age at which all educationists agree they should be under special training and guidance, both educational and moral, and which up to now has almost entirely baffled the attempts of educationists to formulate a curriculum to deal with it, you are going to take them away from all home influence to Australia, and not into the cities.

I am not arguing that they should go into the cities to compete directly with the existing workers there, but you are going to isolate them on farms far away from towns, possibly away from all social contact, away from the influence of womenfolk who are necessary for the development of boys at such ages, to grow up possibly along with men who may have spent from 10 to 20 years in that isolated condition and have themselves become hardened and cynical, not knowing the softening influence of women. You take the boys at this impressionable period and allow them to grow up not knowing their proper relationship to the other sex, not realising what is the trouble within the new urges that prompt them, to grow up with a false view of the relationship of men and women. Do you expect then that you are making for morality in circumstances like that? Those responsible for the scheme already foresee what the effect is going to be, because in the circular issued from the Ministry of Labour and in the reports issued by the Committee on Oversea Settlement it is stated that girls are also to be included in the scheme, and that it is hoped to make settlement oversea as easy a step as entry into industry as a messenger boy or clerk or apprentice.

We on this side of the House are usually charged with being engaged in propaganda for, and desiring a scheme of things which is going to break up the family, and take the children from the parents and isolate them, and here you have this system, under a Conservative Government, deliberately devised, by which boys who are little more than children, from 14 to 17 years of age, and girls under that age, are to be shipped oversea. Even if there is no immediate intention of bringing girls of that age under the scheme there is the ultimate intention of taking them from their parents, because you are training them at home in cookery and domestic science. There is the shortage of domestic servants. Girls are refusing domestic service, and such girls will be excluded from benefit by the Employment Exchange. So you are going to take the boys oversea immediately, and then you are going to take the girls and send them to domestic service, so that you are in effect breaking up the family. [ Laughter. ] Hon. Members may laugh, but I ask is there one hon. Member opposite who would consent to his boy or girl being sent out in these conditions?

Yes.

Yes!

On a point of Order. A question has been asked as to whether any of us would consent to our boys going to Canada. I find that from the time they get to 18 they have got to have a moral sense, if I do my work properly.

I am afraid that that is not a point of Order.

I think that my question was pertinent, and that I am correct in saying that no Member on the Government side or on this side of the House would voluntarily allow his boy or girl of 14 years of age—

Oh!

The hon. Member is surprised to know that the Government propose to send boys of 14, but it is so. The Government scheme provides for sending boys of from 14 to 17 and girls ultimately, and I am certain that there is no member on the Government side of the House who would agree to his boy and particularly to his girl, even at 18 years of age, going abroad, in the conditions that are being laid down. There are plenty of safeguards, but we know the value of all the safeguards. The parents' consent has to be got in the first place. Welfare officers shall accompany the emigrants on the vessel on the way out. On the other side they are to be met by officers of the Australian Government. There the boys are to enter into an agreement with the Australian Government, and also with the employer. Incidentally the employer will be selected as carefully as the boys themselves. I heard it stated from the other side of the House to-day that those who are to be sent out are those who are capable of going in for farming. That is not so. I happened to have the opportunity, at one place where interviewing is going on for emigrants, not the juvenile emigrants, but the slightly older ones, of hearing applicants interviewed, and not one of them had any training in agriculture or the slightest knowledge of farm work, and yet when they were asked if they were willing to go on to farms, they said "yes." That is what is happening all over. It is not farm workers who are being taken out, but unemployed from the towns, and these boys and girls are to be sent out to private employers.

It is a Government scheme from the time the boys offer themselves on this side to the time they land on the other side. Then immediately the employer is selected, and it ceases to be a Government scheme except in the sense that the Commissioner for Immigration and Lands is to be the guardian. The ordinary school teacher knows the difficulty of dealing with a class of 60 which he has immediately under his own control, and so he will realise the difficulty of dealing with boys to the number of 500 per month, which is the number expected when the scheme is working fully. There is to be periodical inspection, and the boys are to have the right to put forward any complaints which they may care to place before the inspector. But we have our systems of inspection here. We have our factory inspectors, and we know that they are totally inadequate in number. We know that they do not always do as they might do, and we know that there are innumerable abuses of the Factory Acts going on every day of the week. We have our mines inspectors, and we know what has happened in the mines. All this inspection is all right so far as it goes, but it is going to be inadequate.

If it had been a Government scheme the matter would have been different, because then the farms to which the boys would be allotted could be located near towns within reach of some social life, and of the influences for good with which they should come in contact. But in all the schemes in the leaflets of the Ministry of Labour or in the others there is no provision made for the one thing that is the concern of hon. Members most of all when they are criticising us for our ungodliness and our lack of religion, as they allege. There is no provision for spiritual guidance for the boys. There are tremendous lapses in that matter, and it is a crying scandal that the British Government should bring forward any scheme such as that which breaks up the family. When we ask assistance for boys and girls, for the feeding of school children, we cannot get it because it is said that there is a scarcity of money, and also that it is a bad line to go on because it weakens parental responsibility, and that would undermine the principles on which civilisation has been built up. But you can take boys away from their parents, when it is only working class boys and girls, while other people can bring up their children at home and keep them at school until they are 18, and when we do manage, through the pressure of educationists and labour organisations, to get an Education Act put through the House of Commons raising the school age and giving facilities for boys and girls to remain at school, then you do not find any great enthusiasm on the other side. You get a postponement for a period of three years, and then a further postponement until the crisis has passed. We cannot deal with the matter in that way.

In the case of Canada, we have a scheme being considered for the immigration of boys and girls, and though I disagree entirely with the policy of emigrating boys and girls from this country, yet that scheme is in some respects a considerable advance on the Australian scheme. They are to take the boys and girls over and put them into groups. They are going to give them training first of all, and then they are going to put them into a settlement and that settlement is to be within a reasonable distance, say not more than five or six miles from, the farm on which they are going to be employed. And if at any time they feel that they are not getting the treatment to which they think they are entitled then they can go back to the group settlement and have their case investigated. That is an advance, and it can be done in Scotland and England in connection with the agricultural colleges. You could have experimental farms on which the boys and girls could be trained, on which they could be kept in contact with one another, on which they might be in reasonable contact even with their homes from time to time, if only once a week. It would be no worse than a boarding school. You would not then have the charge made against you of undermining the family or proselytising, which might reasonably be made by certain religious denominations, in the case of boys and girls taken from home. You could then have the possibility of inculcating into their minds some of the moral considerations which boys and girls of that age should get. You would then be doing something to develop the agriculture of this country. The hon. Member who spoke last stated that agricultural land in this country is going out of cultivation and that a large number of acres went out of cultivation within the last year. It is a disgrace that we should have land in England, Scotland and Wales going out of cultivation while we are showing this anxiety to send our boys and girls overseas in order that the Empire may be developed. It seems to me the wrong way to set about the development of the Empire. We ought to make the best possible use of our own resources at home and when it is proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that we have exhausted all our efforts to maintain our population, then and only then, should we consider the possibilities of the development of overseas resources. Never will you get the consent of hon. Members on this side of the House to the wholesale shipment of boys and girls overseas so long as they are being taken over to be exploited by private employers who have no interest in their welfare and so long as you are putting up money to subsidise private enterprise. If you can get the Governments of Australia and Canada and South Africa to develop their own land and co-operate with us, then we shall consider the possibility of co-operating in schemes by which whole families may be brought out, thereby safeguarding the family life of these people. As it stands just now, what the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Shinwell) stated with regard to shipping is equally true with regard to the land. Emigration, whatever its intention may be—and it may be the best in the world—is going to have the effect of making big profits for the shipping companies and ultimately creating a boom in the sale of real estate. That is what is happening just now and that is what is going to happen.

I think the hon. Member's remarks are liable to misconstruction. I must correct him on one point in connection with the Australian scheme of which he is speaking. All the land is Crown land. It is a Government scheme, and all the land belongs to the Government. [HON. MEMBERS: "The farms do not!"]

The farms to which the boys are going are not owned by the State, and are not worked by the State. The land is rented by the farmer, who works it for himself, and whatever he can get out of it is his own. There is no question of the produce belonging to the State and the farmer receiving a remuneration of so much per year. It is a question of working the farm for profit. The Minister of Agriculture seems to be amused that that should be so, but the Minister of Labour has yet to understand the difference between working for the community and working for a private employer. He is probably in the happy position of never having had to work for a private employer. I can assure hon. Members opposite that it makes a big difference. The permanent officials of a Government are the servants of the community, and when you are dealing with permanent officials who have charge of juveniles you can rely on them taking an interest in that work because they are not concerned about making profits out of the juveniles, whereas a private farmer is solely concerned about making profits out of them. In the case of a scheme under one of the Churches some years ago of emigration to New Zealand, boys were being sent out to receive 7s. 6d. per week when 25s. to 30s. per week was the standard rate for boys ordinarily engaged in the feeding and milking of cattle in New Zealand. The boys sent out under these schemes are said to be regarded on the farms as members of the family. I sincerely hope I do not personally know any boy who is going out to be regarded as a member of the family on some farms, because cases have been known in New Zealand where boys and girls of seven and eight years of age were sent out to milk cows between three and four o'clock in the morning and again between eight and nine o'clock in the morning—[ Laughter. ]—in the evening. Hon. Members are quite entitled to have their laugh if they can get it cheaply. They are looking for cheapness in all things. In the conditions which I have indicated I hope the Government will never get the consent of the Opposition in this Parliament to any such scheme. I hope the British people will register their protest against this sort of thing, and let the House understand that they want to retain their boys and girls at home to train them here, and will insist that if there be any necessity to remove people abroad, the family shall be treated as a whole.

I claim a double dose of the conventional indulgence because I am not only a new Member, but an old new Member of this House. I think it is pleasanter that a new Member should confine his remarks if possible to some non-controversial subject, but I feel constrained to record a protest against the speech of the hon. Member who has just sat down, because he has made a wholly fantastic and fictitious grievance out of what is really a tremendous benefit to people of his own class. The fact is there are thousands of parents, perhaps parents who voted for hon. Members on this side of the House, and thousands of children, both boys and girls, of 14 years of age who feel in themselves the instinctive British genius for going abroad, the genius of Empire building. It is only to those parents and for those children that the State says, "If you have not got the means to gratify this spirit of ambition and enterprise, then the State will find the money for you." One would think from the vehement denunciation which has proceeded from the last speaker that he would prefer these children to remain at home to swell the ranks of the hunger marchers, so that in that way class hatred might be—

Is it in order that a speaker should deliberately misrepresent? I did not state that they were to be left hero to swell the numbers of the unemployed. I said the unemployment problem was insoluble under existing conditions unless we adopted entirely new methods.

I do not think the hon. Member for Tiverton (Mr. Sparkes)is out of order. If he has unintentionally misrepresented the hon. Member for Maryhill (Mr. Muir), that has now been corrected.

The hon. Member created the impression on these benches that he would prefer the ranks of the hunger marchers to be increased for the purpose, as we say, of feeding the fires of class hatred. [HON. MEMBERS: "Send your own people out first!"] I myself served in India for 25 years. [ Interruption. ]I wish, however, to address myself at present to that portion of the King's Speech which states that the condition of agriculture continues to receive careful consideration. We back-benchers on this side of the House hope that this will be the very last time such a pious expression of opinion may appear in any King's Speech.

It will be the last King's Speech, I hope.

We hope that agriculture is to be relieved effectively during the life of the present Parliament. To my mind the cause of agriculture reached its high-water mark in the Agriculture Act of 1920, under Part I of which for the first time subsidies were granted in connection with prices. Just as the passing of that Act was the glory of the Coalition Government so the repeal of Part I of the Act was the tragedy which really led to the downfall of the Coalition Government, because it showed them to be lacking in that courage which alone can maintain any Government in power. Hon. Members who represent agricultural constituencies are grateful for the promises which are vouchsafed. We are grateful for the promise of relief from the unjust incidence of taxation, whilst hoping and praying that the burden of which we are relieved in one quarter is not going to be shifted to another; and we are grateful for the promise of State credits to farmers. But, after all, it is no use financing men engaged in an industry unless the industry is to pay; and unless the Government takes much more drastic steps than these, the result may be that that form of relief alone will merely enable farmers to pay off creditors from resources which would not otherwise be available. The fact of the matter is that the whole policy for agriculture depends on the answer to one question, an answer which the Government must give: Is there any occasion on which our Army, Navy and other forces would be utilised to any large extent unless on that self-same occasion and for the self-same reason we should require the largest supply of home-grown food that the soil can yield? Therefore, the sole agricultural policy is this: If it is necessary to maintain an Army and a Navy, for the self-same reason it is necessary to maintain home-grown food up to the utmost capacity of the soil. I would like to ask the Admiralty whether it is not true that their Naval Estimates are very much increased because of the necessity for budgeting for ships that will convoy vessels laden with food for this country in times of war and stress?

My policy is not a visionary policy, but a real policy. Unless this country is prepared to dip its hands pretty deeply into the national pocket, we cannot do anything effective for agriculture. I admit that a trinity of sacrifices in which none is afore or after the other is called for. You cannot have an effective agricultural policy unless the Labour Members, for instance, are prepared to sacrifice their principles or prejudices, that nothing can be done for agriculture unless the land be nationalised. I hold that nothing can be done in this House for agriculture except on the footing that private enterprise must govern the ownership of land during the life of this present Parliament. That is Labour's sacrifice. The sacrifice of the Liberal benches is this: They must not raise up their mouldy doctrine of Free Trade, for the protection which we ask at their hands is not the protection to which they are accustomed to refer in distinguishing it from Free Trade; it is the protection which is nothing more nor less than national defence, for the same reason that we have protection by means of the Army and Navy. That will be their contribution towards the only policy that can be effective, namely, at any cost to restore agriculture, which is not merely a key industry, but the master key industry of all key industries. Unless we can restore agriculture to a paying basis all our efforts are worth nothing.

Lastly, there is a sacrifice which I ask my colleagues on the Conservative benches to make. I ask them to be quit of any of their Tariff Reform schemes or of any schemes of Protection with regard to imported food. It is quite certain that the Government of this country has for all time passed to the masses, because there is universal suffrage and women have got the votes, and the masses will never tolerate any menace to the cheap loaf." History repeats itself, and the lesson of history is that the more you enlarge the franchise the more you enlarge Conservative majorities in this House. As a good Conservative democrat, I know that the wider you fling open the franchise the more you will make it necessary to enlarge the benches on the Conservative side of the House. The sacrifice that we Conservatives must make is this—there must be no suggestion of Protection or of the taxation of imported food. Homegrown food must compete with the cut-competitive prices of imported food, and the money that is required to restore our agriculture must come out of the same national purse as that from which we pay the cost of the Army and Navy. In other words, it must be put on the Estimates. It is only by these sacrifices from every section of the House that anything can be done to restore agriculture to the level of a paying industry, and until that is done all this patchwork relief can be of no lasting use. Those are the only basic principles on which it is useful even to discuss the agricultural policy of this or any other Government. It is always difficult to recede from a position that you have lost. In the last War we said that never again would we be wholly dependent on foreign food. Are we nearer to or further from the next great war? If you say that there will never be another great war, that is a reason for disarmament, but so long as this Government or any other Government provides hundreds of millions, and rightly so, for the protection of the King's Dominions by our Navy and Army and Air Force, it must at the same time provide for the sister service of home agriculture.

I want to express the opinion that this House is the constitutional forum for the country. The King's Speech is, of course, the Government's declaration of the policy which it is proposed to pursue during the Session. People are judged for their sins of omission as well as for their sins of commission. It seems to me that the King's Speech omits many things of prime importance to meet present-day difficulties. A very slight reference to the question of housing, which is a very urgent ques- tion. If it is right to have a national agriculture on the lines indicated by the last speaker, and to have a national Army and Navy, it is also essential that we should have immediately national schemes of housing to meet the dire conditions of the time. The county medical officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire sent me a day or two ago a few excerpts from reports which he receives nearly daily. They tell about the homes for heroes promised by the ex-Prime Minister in one of those excellent speeches which he cannot follow out. Here is one excerpt:

6.0 P.M.

Another feature of the King's Speech is the failure to mention the bargain that we promised to keep at the Convention in the United States in 1919 relative to the forty-eight hours' working week. A nation like ours, the proudest and, I think, the best nation in the world—[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] Yes, I think it, and I am not trimming when I say it—a nation like ours ought to honour the contracts and uphold the bargains which they make with other nations, and there was a bargain made at the Convention in America in 1919 that the countries should in general agreement adopt a 48-hours working week. Our Governments, the present Government and the last Government, have not carried out that obligation, and I want to claim that the King's Speech is lacking in that point of honour, in not carrying out the obligation arrived at on that occasion. Indeed, the very opposite is now taking place. The atmosphere of the country has been such recently that the great journals of the Kingdom, the great employers' associations, the great combinations, have all been declaring in favour, not of establishing by law the bargain made in 1919, but proposals are being made and suggestions fostered for the extension of the hours of labour. I want to say that the only blessing left out of the great and useless War is the 48-hours working week by agreement. That is in danger of going by the board, and I want to see it made safe and secure by the real constitutional method of passing it through the two Chambers of Parliament. I am not speaking without my book, because one of the leading Chambers of Commerce in this Kingdom in the month of January have been declaring their views on the question of the hours of labour. The Leeds Chamber of Commerce, in their annual report, are breathing what our working people are feeling, the suspicious atmosphere that is being generated throughout the Kingdom, and they say in that annual report: repudiate to the very fullest degree. They say:

I am not going to enter into the question of the matters relevant to land. There are experts here. I have always expressed the opinion, though, that in a great nation like ours, with records and traditions beyond any recorded in newspapers or even in histories, records and traditions that are down in our hearts, more foodstuffs should be grown from the land. It should be the basic and chief industry in the Kingdom, but, cannot be so as long as we have the landless man and the manless land, because of our private system of land ownership, because pheasants and partridges are of more importance than people in some parts of England, and because the game laws are more important than the land laws. I have often expressed the hope and the opinion that in place of saying now, as we have to say, The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness the landlord's, we shall return to the old Book and say, "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." We ought to follow our Scripture and our prayers day by day, as spoken to us in this House.

Then there is one other big omission from the King's Speech, an omission that seems to me of prime importance also. I want to see the time come when this House of Commons, this place here that makes the laws of our Kingdom, will say: "We will turn the instruments of war adrift, we will adopt disarmament as our policy, we will set an example to the world." I am a Tolstoyan who believes that the best resistance to evil is not by force, but by silent resistance, which is more powerful than force in every possible direction. These may be old-fashioned theories of 2,000 years ago, but I believe they will fit to-day if you examine them. I want to suggest that on the benches opposite there are hon. Members who are making declarations that must mean the encouragement of war. The very speeches made recently by Ministers of State have been about the next war, and those 900,000 folk who died, who courageously fought and died, and those who are left behind maimed and wounded, and those who served and were not maimed and wounded, all took part in the War, believing it was to be the war to end all war, and the last of wars. Yet Ministers of State, men of high degree, are talking callously—I do not mean wickedly callously, but carelessly callously, about the next war. Even the hon. Baronet the Member for Twickenham (Sir W. Joynson-Hicks), in an address last week, was talking about the Air Service and the extension of the Air Service, and about the next war. Let us talk about the next peace. It is far more important, indeed, to cultivate an atmosphere of peace than continually to talk about the bombs that we can drop from aeroplanes, airships, and so on, decimating a county or a country. They are speeding up warfare and bloodshed, but let us try the paths of peace as fully as we can.

My last point is that the Prime Minister dealt the other day with the depression in trade and the question of unemployment. I was very pleased to find, in a speech recorded the other day, that the hon. and gallant Member for Barkston Ash (Lieut.-Colonel Lane-Fox) had made a very hopeful speech about trade. I trust it is a correct hope, because we are anxious for good trade, every one of us. There is no division of opinion there. Our people cannot live now except there is an improvement in trade. There has been such a depression for 2½ years, partly arising from the last war, partly from natural causes, and partly from unnatural systems of society, that we are anxious, all of us, to see this revival in trade; but when the Prime Minister made his suggestions about schemes of work, I wonder if he remembered that the numbers he gave as regards unemployment can be multiplied, as was mentioned here yesterday by one of the speakers from these benches. There are a large number of people over 60 years of age who are unemployed, who are not recorded at the Employment Exchanges. They have become broken-hearted at the Employment Exchanges. They have been turned down as partly not physically fit to follow certain employments, and they have been wiped out of the list, either by committees or by regulations or by schemes, and there are scores of thousands of folk over 60 years of age and under 21 years of age who are not included in the Prime Minister's records of the unemployed persons of this kingdom. We have got to recognise, of course, that even in days of prosperity now there will be unemployment, and the Governments of the country in future must make preparations for dealing with the unemployed as they come along, because until we change our system of employing people for profit, as we do now, as the "Times" admitted the other day that there will be a surplus of persons unemployed even in normal times. This matter is one that the Prime Minister himself recognised the other day when a deputation waited upon him in Downing Street relative to the question of unemployment, because he gave a very nice, a very pertinent, and a very apt description of the situation. He said: and that a man at times has no value, we have brought man below the beasts of the earth, and I want this country of ours, and this Parliament of ours, to use every agency possible to raise man to the high level of being, above the beasts of burden, and to give him the chance that God intended he should have to live a peaceful, happy and contented life.

The hon. Member for Batley and Morley (Mr. Turner), who has just sat down, will forgive me if I do not follow him in his interesting speech, but I would like to make one observation on it, and that is that if he were a landlord himself, I am not sure that he would be so certain about the fulness of the land accruing to the landlord. I rise with a good deal of reluctance to-night, because I have a regard and esteem for the present Government, and I should like to do nothing but express them. But it falls to my lot to-night to make a faint discord in the orchestral harmony of praise that has greeted the Foreign Secretary on his return from Lausanne.

I am not going now to weary the House by a long catalogue of the errors of the past, or any close political analysis of what has happened, but I hope the House will forgive me if, only for two minutes, I emphasise one or two of the contributing factors which have led us to our present situation. On the 5th January, 1918, the late Prime Minister made a very solemn declaration that we were not fighting to take away Thrace from Turkey or the fair lands of Asia Minor. He reaffirmed that later on. In November, 1918, Turkey was a beaten country, but a peaceful country, and I will even say that there was relief in a sense, in spite of that defeat, because although peace came with a national and a military disaster, it did not come as an individual calamity to the people. Then by March, 1919, that promise of the late Prime Minister followed other promises, and it was on the dust heap. Greek troops were landed at Smyrna under the protection of British battleships. Massacres occurred. We occupied Constantinople. We arrested perfectly honourable men, many of whom were Anglophile. One was Rahmy Bev, who was officially thanked for his kindness to British residents in Smyrna during the War. We arrested that man, sent him to Malta, and there, for three years, we left him, and others like him, without any single charge being made against him.

All those things contributed to the difficulty in which we find ourselves at the present moment. Of course, what the late Prime Minister intended to do was to unite the Entente and bring about the partition of Turkey. What he actually did was to divide the Entente and to unify Turkey. Obviously his intention was to found a great Greek Empire from Ephesus by Smyrna to Bythmia and Paphlagonia to the Pontus. Actually what he did was to bring the Turk back with éclat into Europe. What I say about that is this: No conference—it does not matter who presides—is going to do any good at all until we recognise that we have made mistakes, and admit we have made mistakes. I say that for this very good reason, that until you make that admission, you will not show the thing which is essential in any conference between us and the Turk, and that is British good-will to the Turk. Until we have admitted we made those mistakes in the past, and turn our back upon our past policy, the Turks will continue to believe that we have our old policy simply dressed in a new suit. The two things that are most important and most essential to us, if we want to make peace in the East at the present moment, are these. We must regain the belief in our good word, which has been lost, and we must show good-will, and I humbly suggest to this Government that the easiest and richest investments that they can make are good-will and honour regained in the East. A few months ago we were brought to the edge of a senseless war, and then the Foreign Minister, whose policy in the past has been apparently the policy of his Government, determined to save England from the consequences of his own action. He went to Paris and achieved peace, and received the thanks of the nation. I do not say that he would have been able to achieve peace if it had not been for the very able co-operation of Sir Charles Harington in Constantinople and Sir Horace Rumbold; but peace was achieved, and an enormous cloud was removed from our horizon.

From Paris, Lord Curzon went to Lausanne, and in Lausanne he did not achieve peace. He did not achieve peace, I think, for two reasons. First of all, it would have been very difficult to achieve it after the telegram of M. Poincaré to the Turks, because the result of that telegram could only be one thing. If you have got one debtor—Turkey—owing a combined and an inseparable debt to two creditors—France and England—and one of those creditors says to the debtor, "Well, so far as I am concerned, I do not mind if you do not pay your debt now," I think it is a pretty safe conclusion that that debt will not be paid. That was one reason. The other reason why peace was not achieved then was this. With all the incomparable industry which Lord Curzon has, and with all his brilliant qualities, he did not carry good will to Lausanne, and when he spoke to the Turks with whom he was negotiating, he spoke to them as he might have spoken before the battle of Sakaria, but not after that battle. It was circumstances that had changed and not Lord Curzon, and he spoke to the people with whom he was negotiating as he speaks to us very often. We are his countrymen and we put up with it, though we do not like it.

There is one other point. It is not a point against the Government, because I recognise that the action of the Government as a whole has been inevitable, but I should like to speak about the constitution of the delegation that went with Lord Curzon to Lausanne. I know most of the distinguished gentlemen who went with him. I have the honour to say that many of them have been my friends for many years, and they are wholly admirable people. There is only one reason why it is a pity that they went to Lausanne. The reason is that their spiritual home is in Greece, and if one day a delegation is sent to Athens, I hope that same delegation will be sent. I can only make this suggestion, and that is, in order to add lustre to it, the father of the House, and the friend of all the House, the hon. Member for the Scotland Division of Liverpool (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) should accompany them to Athens, since he shares the same honour with his very brilliant predecessor Demosthenes in that he is a freeman of the City of Athens. Once again we are very nearly back at the point where we found ourselves before. We are very near war, and war about what? It is not war about Mosul, because that is practically settled. It is not war about the Christian minorities, because they, unhappy people, if there should be war, are going to suffer as they have suffered in the past. It is not war about the capitulations, because that, too, can be settled. If we are going to war, what is it to be about? It is really only going to be about one thing. It is to recover by force the prestige that has been lost by folly.

The thing I would most earnestly suggest to the Government is that a new conference be invited, as soon as possible, and that they very seriously consider the question of withdrawing our troops from Constantinople. I say that in no kind of spirit of panic. I would not see those troops withdrawn until sensible arrangements have been made between Sir Charles Harington and Mustapha Kemal Pasha, but I would like to see the troops withdrawn as speedily as may be, for this reason. We have got a very small force of troops in Constantinople. They are surrounded by very large forces of troops who have never ceased to be technically enemy troops. I do not believe there are more than 5 per cent. of the Turks who want war with us, but there are 5 per cent., and, what is more, it is very much to the interest of a number of people there to involve us and the Turks in war, and anyone who knows Constantinople knows how very easily that can be done. Before we do retire, I hope that peace will be signed, but I hope that the Prime Minister will consider these two questions very earnestly and very seriously.

It may be said that it is impossible for us to do this because of the question of unity with out Allies. I agree with the Prime Minister. I agree with Lord Grey. I agree with the right hon. Member for Paisley (Mr. Asquith). I agree with the Leader of the Opposition. I agree with all those that it is very essential for us, if we possibly can, to co-operate with France. I agree that French co-operation is the most valuable thing we have in our armoury for the restoration of Europe, but if you cannot get French co-operation, then you have got to do without the most valuable thing. At the present moment, or rather, during the past year, our policy in the East has been as different as our interests are at the present day in the Ruhr, and not all the lucrative hysterics of Lord Rothermere will make the ordinary man think otherwise. What I am saying, believe me, I am saying without any desire whatsoever to wound French susceptibilities. But we have got to recognise this fact. The French got tired of our policy in the East—our classic policy—I might almost say the archæological policy of the late Prime Minister. They got tired of that policy, and left us, and sent. M. Franklin Bouillon to make a separate agreement. The Italians, not wanting to engage in a useless war, have made their own arrangements. What I hope, and, I think most in this House hope, is that if a conference can be summoned, we shall come to a collective agreement between Turkey and our Allies, but if we find we cannot come to a collective agreement, then I very much hope that steps will be taken by ourselves alone.

There are only two other things I should like to speak about, and very briefly. There are constant references made in this House and in the Press in a derogatory sense to the forces behind Mustapha Kemel Pasha as Kemalists. I hope the House will believe me when I say that is not the case. You might just as well have called an English volunteer at the beginning of the war who was fighting to protect the inviolability of England an Asquithian, or at the end a Lloyd-Georgian. He was neither. He was an Englishman fighting for England. These people in Turkey are Turks fighting for Turkey. What is the position as I see it at the present moment? It is difficult to exaggerate the gravity of it. Our negotiations have once again failed. Now in Asia the army of the British and the army of the Turk face each other in the field. In Thrace the Greeks and the Turks are opposite to each other. Hostilities might break out there.

In Irak we hold a vast stretch of territory from Basra to Mosul—I suppose one of the longest lines of communication in the world—and that in a country that has got no frontiers, and is open to propaganda of every possible kind. What is the political situation? Is it not this—unfortunately? Not only that Angora has got its alliance with Moscow, but Angora has also got its alliance with Afghanistan, made, I think, three of four months ago. Beyond that the whole of Asia is inflamed with passion. Where is this going to end? Are we going to war about nothing? Is not this our position? England is a giant with one foot in the West and another foot in the East. If you break one of our legs you upset our balance. With all these factors against us in the East, all I say is this: I am not one of those who believe that we cannot fight. I believe in a good and a just quarrel we can fight and that we can win. But this is not a good or a just quarrel. This is a foolish quarrel. It is a legacy to us from the last Government. What I believe is this: If we do go to war in the end we shall win, but I am quite certain we shall follow our national habit of being beaten in the first year. I thank the House very much for the indulgence that has been shown to me. I only repeat what I have already said: that I very much hope the Prime Minister will open the door to a new conference. However good one may think the present Treaty, it might be better. For instance, Bulgaria is still left cut off from the sea. I am firmly convinced in my mind that if a new conference is opened under different circumstances, we shall reach a solution and a satisfactory solution of this question.

Every Member of the House who has had the pleasure of listening to the hon. and gallant Gentleman will have received from his speech a valuable presentation of the case from his standpoint. We all have had our attention focussed once more on the important, difficult, and most saddening spectacle of what has come out of the Conference at Lausanne. What are going to be our relations in the Near East in regard to all that has happened there since the War? I am quite sure we all recognise the entire sincerity of the hon. and gallant Gentleman, alike in his analysis of the situation and in the justness of his aim, but there is another side, that he did not make any part of his argument. I wonder whether it could have been made a part of his argument to mention the continuous and progressive concessions made by the Allies to Turkey at every stage of the Conference. Also the further fact that to-day, if that Conference document had been signed, it would have meant an attitude of the Western Powers and the Powers of Europe generally towards Turkey different from any attitude which has been taken up, certainly from any attitude which has been unitedly adhered to since the Turk conquered Constantinople.

My few words in regard to the Treaty of Lausanne are to express the grief and the humiliation, which I am confident are widely felt in this country, that England should in any circumstances have been obliged to make, or be open and willing to make, such concessions to and arrangements with Turkey, which are in the sharpest and most violent contrast to age-long policy in Europe of not allowing the Turk to regain the power that once was his. We remember that the Turk, with some distinguished virtues, has many qualities of another kind which are far more allied to a type of nation outside European civilisation than the type of any nation within that sphere. Why has not the hon. and gallant Gentleman, who gives the Turks the incomparable advantage of his friendship and advocacy, not addressed to them the kind of advice and observations he has addressed to this House, and through this House to his own country?

If there be a danger of war to-day surely the fault and the risk lie at the door of those who have been more successful after defeat than they were for 300 years after victory, and who have gained from Europe, reluctantly it may be, disunited it may be, but still from Europe, a vast power and recognition which they have not had for centuries. Surely it is to the successful diplomatist, to the party that has gained all these things, that the persuasive accents of the hon. and gallant Gentleman should be addressed. When all is said and done this is not a question of warfare between the Turk and the Greek. Still less is it a question of conflict between one religious faith and another. It is a part of the age-long divergence of view ever since the Turk first rose with his destroying hand and overthrew the Moslem civilisation of Baghdad, destroyed the most ancient empire of Byzantium and the nascent civilization of Hungary, and from thence onwards has pursued a similar course.

We are just as much trustees for the Western view of civilisation as any Oriental is for another view. What is left to comment upon is that in this conflict there has been day after day and week after week the slow surrender of many things that have been held priceless by Europe for the last 300 years. We have been obliged to put up with that old and evil method of the exchange of populations to the misery and the ruin of both, and to abandon nations, who have adhered to their faith amid all their troubles, under the most difficult, if not the most repellant circumstances. All these have been given up one after another almost entirely.

Whilst I along with every Member of the House admit the extraordinary difficulties of the situation and the extreme importance of keeping in step even with the slowest and the most wayward colleague there still remains the result which I have ventured in these few words to describe. No great swelling words of Allied victory can alter facts, and while we all welcome every proper prospect of peace, while we know the immense care and trouble that has been taken by those representing England, whatever their previous position may have been, it is surely right and fit that there should be some of us at any rate in this House who should voice the feeling of disappointment and of humiliation that has come to Western civilisation, which, as we understand it, has not been forwarded but has been injured by the melancholy incidents of the last few months.

While on my feet, and as this is a Debate in which many topics are allowed to be submitted to the House, I may perhaps be permitted to say a few sentences in regard to quite another matter which is included in the most Gracious Speech from the Throne. Much of that Speech is naturally devoted to adumbrating future legislation in domestic matters. There is one matter involving no issue of national or strong controversy upon which I should like to make an appeal to the Government. There is a paragraph in the Speech which deals with the very important subject of local taxation. The paragraph begins by emphasising the desirability of this most difficult subject being dealt with, and ends on the note especially of giving relief to agriculturists. I do not propose to take up the moment of the House by discussing the difficult question of how far taxation could be or should be used for any particular section or any particular class of the community, but is obviously necessary now and then. It is obviously a very bad thing. There are many of us in this House who desire to call the attention of the Prime Minister to the fact that among problems of local Government there is another which might well come before Parliament this Session. This topic connected with local Government is not a matter of controversy at all. It is a very dull and a very important matter of valuation and assessment, and the waste there is to-day by overlapping, by unnecessary varieties of valuation, and in some cases positively evil differences between the values put up by one authority and the values of another authority. All these are matters which do not run along the lines of party difference, and do not raise or should not raise any violent controversy. They are practical matters in which well-devised Measures would give wide-spread satisfaction. They would effect large savings in the public service. Such a Measure that could be more equitably and more readily applied, with a uniform system of valuation and assessment blended in proper proportion, with local knowledge, would remedy many evils. Needful standardisation could be obtained by the employment of proper valuers, and at the same time, the Government who were acting for the taxpayers would have quite a large voice in the matters, a voice less ambiguously used, and one which will make for equity and efficiency in all forms of this complicated and most pressing problem.

It has been suggested that there should be another conference called to deal with the Turkish question. I agree very strongly on that point, but I differ from the hon. Member who made that suggestion as to the causes which led to the failure of the recent negotiations of the Turks. I think the underlying cause of Lord Curzon's failure, which was so disappointing to us, was the nature of our relations with Russia. It seems to me, therefore, that though the urgency of the question of the Ruhr has been rightly debated first, that question is inseparable from the Near East question. Indeed, the Near East question ought to be taken first, because in connection with the Ruhr we should be glad to have the question referred to the League of Nations, but France would not approve. Does it not amount to this, that our hands are tied in regard to proposing something which would affect our neighbours in France because we are bound to attempt to keep on the closest terms of friendship with France for the purpose of our policy in the Near East? Therefore, it is very much in place that my hon. Friend has called the attention of the House to the urgency of the Lausanne question.

In the Near East the Allies, four years ago, had a clean slate on which to write a new picture of improved human welfare. It was the only sphere in which the result of the War could be what might be called profitable, in which there was, heaven knows, ample room for improvement. Self-determination was nowhere less realised and tyranny was nowhere greater, and we had an absolutely free hand in November, 1918, to draw the frontiers as we liked and to remove the causes of war. Instead of that, we have what is universally admitted to be a disastrous failure, and while the Prime Minister expresses the hope that even yet the Turks may sign, still we feel there is something of piety about that hope. We hardly think it credible that for some time to come Ismet Pasha and his friends will change their minds.

Lord Curzon talks of some malignant influence which prevented the Turks accepting the handsome offers made to them. What is that malignant influence? Is it something irremovable which we are up against, or is it not truly to be interpreted in plain words as the hostility of the Russian Government? Can that be called exactly a malignant influence when it is the natural result of the policy of the late Government and of this Government? Is it fair to charge this Government with the crimes of the Allies or to treat it as being of the same mind? After all, in this respect it is in the main the same men. It is the same policy which we see pursued in regard to Russia, Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. Moreover, this Government has a great deal more knowledge to go upon than the last Government had. The attempt to knock out the Soviet regime and to set up what would be more satisfactory to Conservative views in this country has been proved to be impossible, however desirable. Again, in regard to Greece, time has shown that Greece was powerless to be a successful instrument as against Turkey, and the revival of Turkey has surprised the world and formed an ascertained fact on which it ought to have been easier to base an objective policy.

Another thing that has come to light is that one of the small enemy Powers on which we had desired to tread, namely, Bulgaria, when alarm was felt as to the possible excessive fighting power of the Turks, came to be regarded as a desirable instrument for resisting them. On all these things the Labour party have expressed views which have been consistent. The Labour party has not waited to see which way the cat would jump, but it has put on record views which time has proved to be correct. Its views, above all, on our relations with Russia have proved to be confirmed by facts, and they have proved to be more than ever true in the sphere of questions dealt with at Lausanne.

May I just review the questions which have been raised there? First of all, there is the question of British interests, on which we are told such great concessions were made which ought to have secured the signature of Turkey to the Treaty. The Labour party has specific charges to make in regard to Lord Curzon's policy. We have failed to get peace, and we have failed to restore the openings for British trade. We have failed in regard to the question of minorities. We have failed as to questions on which all parties in this country and this House are agreed. Everyone wanted particularly to see a settlement in regard to the capitulations and, indeed, the concessions made on that score went in many ways much further than the proposals which have been put forward even by the Labour party. The Labour party suggested that there ought to be at Pera and Smyrna free ports on the model of Dantzig, but Lord Curzon went further than that, but he failed because Russia instigated the Turks to resist. Only on one main point did Lord Curzon not go nearly so far in concessions as we would have him go, namely, in regard to the Straits. Here is the essential point. The other day Mr. Litvinoff said that last two or three weeks, the Rumanian Government whose desire for a free passage to the Black Sea was used by Lord Curzon as a reason for keeping the right of access for warships to the Black Sea, has now gone over to Russia? May I emphasise that point by quoting what has recently appeared in the "Manchester Guardian"?

7.0 P.M.

There is another question which came up concerning the refugees at Trebizond and Samsun. In this House in December last the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs gave us a little information as to what was done with them. I hope the hon. Gentleman will some time in this Debate tell us something more about this question, because we are very much in the dark as to what has happened to these luckless refugees. We were told at one time that our ships were available to remove the refugees from Smyrna, and we would like to have some more information as to what has happened at Trebizond and Samsun. The Government know the colossal sufferings which have been caused by the virtual extermination from Turkey of the majority of the non-Turkish population. The significant thing in this connection is that the only people who have done something for these unfortunates are the Russians. All that has been done to save these creatures has been the action of Russia in finding, on the borders of the Ukraine, a place to which they are moving—I am not sure whether they have moved—200,000 of the refugees. There can be, however, no genuine security guaranteed for the minorities, except by providing them with a country. This applied to the Armenians. On that question Lord Curzon expressed a hope that the Turks would consider the claim of the Armenians to some country in the North-east of Turkey, but in the Treaty proposed to the Turks there was not a single word referring to this territory. Indeed, how could Lord Curzon succeed when his own argument was refuted by himself, since, in March, 1922, he stated to the Turks that their territories should be secured to them from the Caucasus to the Straits? They had been promised that they should not be disturbed in their frontiers. Therefore, we must take it that that claim, which was on the ground of self-determination a perfectly correct claim, has been abandoned. From the Labour party there came a suggestion, which I believe was the only feasible one, that to get a concession of that kind you had to make a sacrifice, and if it lay between adhering to valuable properties at Mosul or carrying out your pledges in regard to self-determination, honour stood first. But the Government did not offer to sacrifice a jot for humanity. It perhaps would have had to sacrifice oil rights, air bases, and prestige. We say that the Government ought to put principle before profit. It is not too late to get something of that kind carried out, if only our policy towards Russia were revised.

There is one supremely important question, in regard to which, at Lausanne, progress might have been made, and on which no great difficulty stood in the way. Balkan peace is vitiated by the fact that Bulgaria is cut off from the sea. I would remind the House that in the Treaty of Neuilly, Article 48, the Bulgarians were promised and guaranteed access to the Ægean Sea. By common consent that has not been carried out. There was no question there of having to coerce anybody; the Turks were not the difficulty; they would have supported us if we had made that proposal. But we were perhaps moved by pride or prejudice, because we had committed ourselves to a pro-Greek policy before, and did not like to admit that it had proved wrong. The policy of the Allies towards Bulgaria under the Treaty of Neuilly was to make an example of them. The people were perfectly helpless, and we proceeded to fleece them in a fashion even exceeding the severity used towards any other enemy. I might refer to the disclosures that have been made in another place by a Tory Peer, Lord Newton, who has taken the trouble to investigate the details. Among other things, he has alluded to what he called the "arrant hypocrisy" of professing adhesion to disarmament proposals in regard to Bulgaria. He has alluded to the absurdity of reparations which would mean doubling the Budget of the country for 37 years and to the fact that the Allied Commission insisted on the payment by that impoverished little State to its typists of sums which, in the depreciated currency of the country, were equal to the salaries of Cabinet Ministers.

We made these absurd demands and we have made impossible the payment of reparations by, for instance, preventing Bulgaria from having access to the Ægean Sea. Bulgaria adopted a policy of obedience and correct action. She has suffered, while the policy of defiance adopted by the Turks has paid. I submit that decency has been flouted by the spectacle of great States squeezing the last ounce out of a tiny prostrate nation. The policy was not, of course, thought out, and in the autumn we suddenly found, at the time of the Mudania Agreement, that we should be very glad if Bulgaria were on our side. The Little Entente also felt that so strongly that they offered to settle the claim of Bulgaria to access to the Ægean Sea. What followed? The Allies stepped in, and persuaded the Little Entente to revert to a policy of excluding Bulgaria from the sea. Whether that action was due to the magnetism of M. Venizelos or not, the result was equally unfortunate. It was a gratuitous blunder, and the fruit that might easily have been secured for the Conference was thrown away. British freights to Bulgaria are 14 per cent. higher, because of this policy, which compels goods to go through the Straits to the Black Sea ports instead of to Ægean ports. It must not be forgotten that the Treaty of Neuilly was signed by the Bulgarians on the understanding that it was a Treaty, not with the Allies alone, but with the Allies and the Americans. Assurances were given to them, when they signed the Treaty, which handed over Western Thrace to the Associated Powers, that it should remain under international control. There were informal assurances, yet after America had left the Allies the country was transferred to Greece. It is no doubt owing to the conditions of our policy in recent years, in regard to Greece, that we have found ourselves unable to fall in with what is obviously a rational policy, appealing to the Powers of the Little Entente. An offer was made to Bulgaria on 27th January of a narrow corridor and a strip of land for a port, but it would have been so vulnerable that nobody would have been found to subscribe the capital necessary for the port. Even the railway rates were not to be under Bulgarian control, while the attitude of M. Venizelos, at Lausanne—even after the murder of the Ministers at Athens, which put him out of the position of official delegate—was such as to show that there would be no unnecessary friendliness on the part of Greece in working that corridor to the Ægean Sea. We may learn whether the Bulgarians were justified in refusing that offer from the fact that at Salonika, where for years a share in the port has been promised to Jugo-Slavia, no agreement has been reached. There is still a quarrel proceeding between those old Allies. What then would have been the value of this offer, made in regard to a corridor, which would have been of far less value than the facilities offered at Salonika to Jugo-Slavs?

I am sorry to have touched at such length on these details, but they may prove to be of enormous importance. The Government, I suppose, profess that their policy is one of unsentimental and realistic views in regard to the hard material interests of this country. They claim to put them before sentimental considerations. What has been the result of the Government policy in the Near East? We have almost totally lost the market which, I believe, not long ago was, as a textile market, the third on the list for this country. It was a market of enormous importance, and it is right, therefore, that this subject is being intermixed with the subject of unemployment in this country. Some of us would wish to see the Government apply real politik to human rights as well as to material interests. If our policy had been dictated by greater humanity we might have avoided what has proved to be the misery of millions and what has brought us a loss of name and prestige throughout the Near East. The policy of setting Greece against Turkey turned the Near East into a desert. Large populations will be found to have disappeared. Turkey will be worth nothing as a market. You can make a desert and call it peace. You can make it peace of a kind, but in this case the policy pursued has not even brought us peace. It has left the Near East what Lord Lansdowne called it, "The powder magazine of Europe." I submit that the way out is to recognise Russia. The Russians may be difficult to deal with; the Turks are difficult to deal with; most people are difficult to deal with, but have we sufficient ground to keep up at this late hour a policy of antagonism and non-recognition? Recognise Russia; revise your policy on the Straits, and then resume the Conference forthwith.

It would be both improper and unreasonable if I were to complain in the slightest degree of the speech which my hon. Friend who has just sat down has made. Of course, everyone recognises that the Debate on the Address is the time when all these matters of public policy are open to criticism and review. At the same time, having regard to the fact that my hon. Friend is recognised everywhere as an authority on the subjects we are discussing, I certainly could have wished he had been able to exercise a certain amount of patience, and wait until he had in his hands the Papers which the Prime Minister yesterday said would be published very shortly. I can hardly believe he would have made quite the same speech if he had had those Papers in his hands. Of course, it is only what one would naturally expect, as the hon. Member cannot be very thoroughly and fully informed on exactly what happened at Lausanne. I believe that when his information is more complete he will proceed to revise a good deal of the opinions he has expressed this evening.

I cannot really imagine that my hon. Friend, whom I know to be a man of candour and straightforwardness, would for one instance have made such an accusation against my Noble Friend (Lord Curzon) as I understood him to make. I understood him to say, practically, that in the negotiations Lord Curzon was conducting, he paid more attention and attached more value to questions of profit than to questions of humanity such as are involved in the provisions on behalf of the Christian minorities. I do not know whether I misrepresent my hon. Friend in suggesting that he put that forward as a general criticism against Lord Curzon.

I think I said in regard to these minorities that while Lord Curzon used brave words they led to nothing.

I can assure my hon. Friend and the House that, speaking generally, nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that in these negotiations material matters of that sort occupied Lord Curzon's mind, or that in the negotiations he placed them higher and more prominently than these other matters. My hon. Friend says that he used brave words but they came to nothing. I presume my hon. Friend and the House know something of the conditions under which these negotiations were carried on. It is an old saying that diplomacy depends upon force. Hon. Members opposite are always talking of the necessity for goodwill and for putting force into the background and having no resort to it. That our relations should be carried on by these methods, I agree, but you have to think of the consequences. I do not know why my hon. Friend makes it a reproach against Lord Curzon that he put forward proposals that did not come to anything. Does he suggest that Lord Curzon should have told the Turks that if they did not give way we would fight them?

I do suggest that if the relations of this country were not unfriendly with Russia, Lord Curzon would have had a great deal more influence.

I believe that is a pure myth which my hon. Friend has got hold of. So far as my information goes, and I think I know as much about this immediate matter as my hon. Friend. I do not think there is a shadow of foundation for the suggestion that our relations with Russia had anything to do with that particular failure. The real fact was, and we may as well be perfectly frank, that, as Lord Curzon said in the House of Lords yesterday, the Turks knew perfectly well that, although this country is a powerful country, and if it is pressed too far it may assert its rights and its power, yet it is known all over the world that the very last thing this country desires is to have to draw the sword, and the Turks have actually taken advantage of that wherever possible, and where they thought they could push matters to a point where we would give way without being forced to draw the sword against them, they have made the best of that position. But is it altogether true, as my hon. Friend says, that nothing was done for the Christian minorities? I quite agree with him in desiring to have seen a great deal more done. I quite agree with him that when dealing with this particular part of the world, and with the Turkish nation in particular, we cannot regard it as sufficient to have provision on paper. I myself would rather have some effective material guarantee—a forcible guarantee, in order that one might be perfectly certain that the provisions on paper are carried out. But I do not think anyone will suggest that was possible to be done under the circumstances. I do not want to weary the House by detailing the actual provisions that have been put into the Treaty, which I still hope will be signed. I think the provisions that have been put there certainly show that Lord Curzon was very fully aware of the necessity for protecting the interests of the non-Mussulman minorities.

Of course, as regards the Armenians to whom my hon. Friend referred, which is a subject in which the hon. Member for the Scotland Division of Liverpool (Mr. T. P. O'Connor) takes great interest, as indeed we all do, I do not think there is any difference of opinion in this House or in the country upon it. But I assure my hon. Friend and the House that Lord Curzon gave more energy, showed more zeal and devoted himself more wholeheartedly to the attempt to obtain for the Armenians something in the nature of a territorial national home than perhaps he gave to any other particular point in the negotiations. But from the first the Turks absolutely refused to meet us. They said that to do such a thing was to part with their sovereignty. Throughout these negotiations they have shown, as we think with great misunderstanding in many cases, an extreme sensitiveness of anything which could be represented as an encroachment on their sovereignty. When Lord Curzon pressed very hard that they should find some corner of their Empire which might be made into a national home for the Armenians, they immediately answered that it would be an encroachment on their sovereignty, and they absolutely refused to have anything to do with it. My hon. Friend gave another example of what he regarded as the failure of my Noble Friend at Lausanne, the failure of the British and of the Allied case, in what he said about the outlet for Bulgaria.

What are the real facts? Here again I am persuaded that, when the Papers are laid before Parliament, my hon. Friend will come to a very different conclusion. To begin with, let us remember that an outlet from Bulgaria to the Ægean is not a very easy thing to provide. It is not easy to give an outlet to the sea to a land which has not a seaboard. It is all very well to talk about a narrow and vulnerable corridor to the sea, but, unless other nations are willing to give large stretches of land sufficient to make large corridors, you have to do the best you can. First of all, my hon. Friend must bear in mind that what was promised in this case was an economic outlet. There never was a promise that there should be actual territory provided by which Bulgaria might come down to the sea on her own territory; and my belief is that the difficulty throughout has been that Bulgaria—not thereby differing, perhaps, from other peoples in similar circumstances—while she has been pressing for the fulfilment of a promise of an economic outlet, has really been thinking much more of a territorial and political outlet.

I will tell my hon. Friend why I think that is so. Early in the Conference, the Bulgarian delegates were invited to state their case in regard to an outlet to the Ægean. They immediately said that the proposal to give them access to the sea and a port at Dedeagatch was quite unsuitable—that that was a place which would be of no use for both geographical and physical reasons; and they said that their own ideal place was one not very far off—only, I think, some six kilometres to the west. They said that that was the ideal place for them to have a port, but they must have complete administrative control over it. My hon. Friend represented the Bulgarians as being very hardly treated—as having had no sympathy shown with them at all, and as having had all their proposals turned down. I do not think it would have been considered very unreasonable if, in the circumstances I have mentioned, the other negotiators had said, "It is really very difficult to make out a case that this existing port will not do while a place six kilometres off will be ideal"; but, instead of that, with the assent of M. Venizelos, the British and French experts were instructed to, and did, draft a series of articles for giving Bulgaria full possession of the particular site for which her delegates had asked. They got out proposals which did provide for the Bulgarians having effective administrative control over that place; and the railway connecting it with Bulgaria it was proposed to put under the management and control of an International Commission. When those proposals had been made, the Bulgarian delegates went home to put them before their Government, and after an absence of a few weeks, they came back and said that the Bulgarian Government refused to accept them.

Even that did not exhaust the efforts that were made to satisfy them, because M. Venizelos himself proposed to them, as an economic outlet—which was all that they had ever been promised—that the real economic flow from their country ought to be to Salonika; and he said that, if they would accept that as the line for their outlet to the Ægean, he was perfectly prepared to give them, in relation to Salonika, all the same rights and privileges which were to be enjoyed by Jugo-Slavia under the Treaty with Greece. I believe that that proposal, again, has either been rejected or at all events has not been, so far as I know, up to the present, accepted by the Bulgarian Government. In these circumstances it does seem to me a little hard that my hon. Friend, before he has seen the papers which will make all these matters very much clearer than I can possibly make them to-night, and in much greater detail, should have represented the treatment of the Bulgarians as a matter for complaint against my Noble Friend and against the Conference as a whole.

I must say something about the speech that was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. A. Herbert), because he approached the subject from quite a different standpoint, and his only agreement, I think, with my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Mr. N. Buxton) was in his, I will not call it an attack, but at all events his reproach against my Noble Friend the Secretary of State. In fact, my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil said that he was in agreement with almost all the great men here—with my hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, with the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Paisley—

On one point.

He was in agreement with all of them. The one unfortunate person who had to stand the racket of his disagreement was my Noble Friend the Secretary of State, who carried out these negotiations. My hon. Friend began by saying that the only possible hope of any peace or arrangement with Turkey was that we should begin by admitting that we made a great mistake—that we were to cry peccavi and ask the Turk if he would forgive us and shake hands. That was the attitude of my hon. Friend. I have no doubt, of course, that there have been many mistakes made. Everyone has been making mistakes. I remember that my hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said yesterday that one of the misfortunes of the situation, and of every other situation, was that every thing we did in this world has progeny. Yes, but it also has a parentage. We ourselves, this Government and every thing that they are doing, have a parentage; and the progenitor usually sits in the seat now occupied by the very innocent figure of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Middleton (Sir R. Adkins). I do not know what was the particular mistake of which my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil was speaking, but does not he think it would be better that he should suggest to the Turks that the mistake was on their side? He is talking about re-establishing good will—

I do not want to interrupt, but, after all, I have no status which would enable me to address such a suggestion to the Turks. I happen, however, to be a Member of Parliament, and have that status here.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Middleton said just now, with perhaps pardonable exaggeration, but no more, that the Turks had the incomparable advantage of the advice and support of my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil. Therefore, if they have that incomparable advantage, I think he might use his influence, or at all events, convey the information to them, that the mistake, if a mistake has been made, was, at all events, not wholly on our side. After all, this country and the Turks were very old friends. We were friends long before these modern troubles—

What about "the unspeakable Turk"?

That is another point of view. I am only stating the fact. The hon. Member thinks, apparently, that that was a deplorable fact. That may be, but it differs from the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil. Until recently, this country and the Turks were friends and allies, but a time came when Turkey, instead of supporting her old allies, who had fought for her in the past, suddenly threw in her lot with the aggressive German Empire, kept us from assisting our own Allies in the Black Sea, and took all the action which led to the war with Turkey as against the Allies. Surely my hon. Friend thinks that the mistake on that occasion was not our mistake, but their mistake.

If my hon. Friend would like to argue with me, I am quite ready to argue with him, but I do not want to interrupt, and he knows that it is an extremely long question that he is raising.

I will content myself with putting it not in an interrogative form. I make the statement of my own opinion, which I hope will not trouble my hon. Friend. I say that in my opinion, at all events, the mistake was on the side of Turkey, and not on our side. When he speaks of the necessity of re-establishing good-will with Turkey I go on to say that even without requiring the Turks to put on the white sheet or to admit that they made any mistake, if they will only behave reasonably and come to terms and accept the extraordinarily generous terms which have been offered them I believe this country and this Government is only too anxious to re-establish good-will and amity with the Turks—I will not say on the old footing which the hon. Member thinks so deplorable, but at all events re-establish friendly relations. Hon. Members opposite are always talking about peace and good-will until it comes to some particular nation with whom we are or want to be in alliance, and then they are always wanting to be at daggers drawn. We on this side want universal good-will and amity. Therefore, as Lord Curzon said yesterday, and has said over and over again at Lausanne, we are most anxious and ready to re-establish friendship with Turkey. My hon. Friend used one phrase which was no doubt very effective as an epigram but utterly untrue in fact. He said that if we were to go to war again, which I certainly hope and believe we shall not do, and which we have no intention whatever of doing, it would be to recover prestige by force that we have lost by folly. I can only assure my hon. Friend that everyone who has been at Lausanne—

I beg pardon. I was not speaking of this Government at all, but of the last Government.

At all events whether in this case the guilty person is the parent or the progeny, I can assure my hon. Friend that the result of the Lausanne Conference, although for the moment it has failed in bringing technical peace and re-establishing peace in the world, has certainly had the effect of very materially enhancing the prestige of this country, because everyone who, has been there pays the highest possible tribute to the conduct of the British Delegation and especially to the extraordinary knowledge, skill, patience and courtesy with which the Secretary of State conducted the Allied side of the negotiations. An hon. Member raised a laugh by saying my Noble Friend had spoken in the Conference in the same way that he often speaks to us, and I suppose from the way in which it was received that was intended to imply that there was some want of consideration and courtesy in his dealing with the delegates. I can assure the House that is the greatest possible mistake and that the personal relations between Lord Curzon and Ismet Pasha were of the best. They frequently met in private, they appeared to understand each other and I am certain Ismet Pasha would be the first to say he was rather surprised by the consideration and the courtesy shown to him by the head of the British Delegation. So far as personal relations were concerned there was nothing that we could have wished better than what took place. It is true they did not actually sign the peace.

The hon. Member for Middleton (Sir Ryland Adkins) wanted to know, as we all want to know, why it was. There was some mysterious suggestion that it was due to our relations with Russia. I do not believe that was so at all. If I had to suggest an explanation, I should make this guess, that the failure to sign and the breakdown at the end came not over the matters which the hon. Member for Norfolk discussed, the Straits and Mosul, but over the financial Clauses, in which we are less interested than some of our Allies. It is very likely that the Turkish Delegation did not wholly appreciate what the meaning of those Clauses was. They may have wanted time to consider them and possibly advice with regard to them. At all events that is the only explanation I can suggest and I have the very greatest possible hope and a certain amount of confidence that when the matter has been more fully considered by Ismet Pasha and by the Government at Angora the Turks will see the terrible mistake they have made from their own point of view in not coming to this arrangement.

The standpoint of the hon. Member for Middleton has, I think, very much more force than that of my hon. and gallant Friend. I can understand criticism of the Government from the point of view of the hon. Member opposite. I can very well understand people who have traditionally held the view which he holds thinking we have given way far too much to the Turks and that we have made concession after concession to them, and, as he put it very strongly, that we are suffering from the humiliation of constant concessions. I think that language goes a little too far, but, at all events, it is a standpoint which, I think, is a much more reasonable one to put before the House of Commons than that of my hon. Friend, who seems to think we have never given anything to the Turks and have treated them with nothing but discourtesy and refusals of their offers. I say to the hon. Member that unless we were prepared to fight for each of these matters one after the other, I do not think we could have avoided making these concessions. There are some of them which, on their merits, if we could have avoided them, accepting the Turkish point of view, we should have been glad to do so, but that is a very different thing from saying they are so important that we should sacrifice or jeopardise the peace of the world in order to obtain our own point of view. It is true, as the hon. Member said, that those concessions were such as have never before been given to a beaten Power in a great war, and that makes it all the more extraordinary that the Turks, who profess to be anxious to maintain peace, have failed to put their signatures to the proposals put before them. It is for that reason, because of reasonableness from their point of view and the greatness of the concessions from our point of view—which will appear to the House when they have the full terms in their hands—that I believe that, although for the moment the Conference appears to have failed, it will not have failed in reality, and that the Turkish signature will be attached.

Let me congratulate the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Aubrey Herbert) upon his admirable speech. I do not think that anything shows so much the difference between the dead Parliament and this very live Parliament than the emergence of my hon. Friend from the cold chamber of silence which he imposed upon himself in the last Parliament. I am afraid that his speech, however eloquent and well-informed, was a mischievous speech. I believe that everything should be done to help the Turks in getting them to sign the Treaty as soon as possible, and my hesitation in rising to speak on the subject is due to a haunting fear in my mind that even a single thoughtless word from so modest a Member as myself might endanger the cause of peace. I want to challenge the whole speech of my hon. Friend. He spoke as though Lord Curzon were a bully who went armed with an Irish shillelagh, hitting a Turkish skull whenever a Turk dared to rise in the cause of Turkey. Let me examine that statement in view of what occurred at Lausanne, according to the Blue Book.

I understand that Turkey before these negotiations was limited to an army of 10,000 in European Turkey. That number was raised by Lord Curzon, if my information be correct, to 20,000. Eventually, the matter was left without any figure. That means that a nation which by one Treaty was confined to 10,000 troops, and by the proposal of Lord Curzon was to be allowed 20,000 troops, is now perfectly free in regard to the number of its troops.

indicated dissent.

I see that the Prime Minister shakes his head. Perhaps I am wrong. At any rate, the 10,000 has been considerably increased, and that is certainly a very great concession to Turkey. I will take another point, which I do not think came into consideration at Lausanne. I understand that by the armistice, the Turks were limited to a few thousand troops in Eastern Thrace. My information is that there are now 40,000 troops there. They have managed to get through our cordon and to get into Eastern Thrace. It is said that there is also a considerable force of Greeks in Western Thrace. That is necessary for the defence of Western Thrace against the army of 40,000 Turks on the other side of the boundary. After consultation with some of the representatives of the Greek nation in this city, I am glad to be able to assure the Prime Minister that the whole desire and determination of the Greeks is to act loyally by their Allies at Lausanne, and in no way to imperil the peace of Eastern Europe.

In face of concessions like these, I am absolutely unable to understand why the Turks did not sign the Peace Treaty at Lausanne. I suppose that, like other delegates in popular assemblies, they have their difficuties at home. Every Member of Parliament must sympathise with the difficulties of the delegate who is away from his place in his Parliament. The Parliament at Angora is composed of an extremist party, and I can understand the difficulty of the delegate at Lausanne hesitating to sign even the most favourable peace until he had made his peace with his colleagues. Subject to that, my confident hope is that the peace will be signed by the Turkish authorities.

I cannot but express my disappointment and sorrow that nothing has been done for the Armenians. I cannot imagine any man, whatever his politics or his creed, not feeling sorrow-stricken at the fact that a million Armenians have been massacred within the last seven or eight years. We talk about prestige. I shared with John Bright, and the old Radicals, who to a large extent formed my spiritual home, a very grave suspicion about the word "prestige." There is one prestige that I should be very sorry to see this country lose, and that is the prestige of good faith to its Allies and those whom it dragged into the War. Beyond doubt, the Armenians were dragged into taking a part in the War against Turkey. They were dragged into it by both France and Great Britain. If necessary I could quote declaration after declaration of English statesmen and eminent French statesmen, from President Millerand to M. Poincaré, that in return for the assistance which the Armenians gave to the Allies—and very powerful assistance it was—they would see that the liberties, the property and the lives of the Armenians were safeguarded. That has not been done. I do not know that any single provision has been made for the Armenians in the Treaty at Lausanne. They wanted a national home. Is that an unreasonable request in a country where before the War they had at least three to four millions of people, many of whom have disappeared by massacre and a large number by flight, under circumstances of horror, to the Caucacus and other countries?

I am sure that Lord Curzon went to Lausanne with the best will towards the Armenians, and I am sure, from correspondence I have had with him in the past, that he is a true and honest friend of the Armenians; but the fact remains that, in spite of his good faith and his good will, the cause of the Armenians, so far as the national home is concerned, has not been served in the Treaty at Lausanne. How can my hon. Friend talk about Turkey being bullied when, in face of the massacres of the Armenians, the Armenian State is left without any relief in the Treaty of Lausanne? Our prestige has been damaged in this matter, as in the case of the Greeks. We encouraged both these people to come into the warfare against such powerful enemies as Germany and Turkey. We got them into the rat trap.

Yes, and they know it. The Greeks and the Armenians know it.

The facts are written in their blood, and therefore it is a terrible reflection on our prestige and that of France that we dragged these unfortunate helpless people into the struggle, and when the wreck came we left them to the vengeance of the people against whom we involved them. Sometimes I think that I am a little old-fashioned in my views of this question. I do not hold them less permanently, because they do not happen to be the fashion of the moment, but it was the policy of all rational people, all democratic people in this country for 40 years, and it was repeated over and over again by leaders of opinion in this country and in France during last year, that it was a crime to give back a Christian population once more to the Turks. Time has justified Mr. Gladstone's warning to his country as to what would happen if Christian people were given back to Turkey, and I am afraid that time will justify my prophecy to-day as to the impossibility of expecting good, humane government or respect for life and property for the Christians who have been abandoned by the Treaty of Lausanne.

I do not think that I need apologise for bringing back the attention of the House to our own problems which affect us perhaps rather more closely at home even than the interesting problems which we have been discussing. I refer to the problems of housing and unemployment. In trying to keep a due sense of proportion as to the various matters which we discuss in this House, I find myself thinking from time to time that these are the only two problems which really matter. Other problems, important though they may be, are important only in so far as they act and re-act upon these two problems. I feel quite certain that if you could only solve or come near a solution of these two problems the conditions under which we meet here, the problems which we have to face, would be vastly different. It may be even that my hon. Friends on my right, the Members for Glasgow, might join with the Prime Minister in pursuing the policy of tranquility, and the Minister of Health, instead of being a somewhat harassed and overworked Minister of State, might find it necessary to kill time by fighting a perpetual round of bye-elections. However that may be, I find it curious, in looking at these questions, to see what antagonistic problems they present, and how true it is that the mere fact at first sight of the existence of one problem may afford some sort of guide to a possible solution of the other.

8.0 P.M.

What is the essence of the problem of unemployment? To ask the question is to answer it. It is that we must endeavour to find some useful work, some work which, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon) has pointed out, is near at hand to the unemployed, some work which benefits the community and which increases the spirit of industry which is the real wealth of the nation. Where will you find that work? Turn to the other problem and examine the shortage of houses, a shortage which exists, I suppose, in all districts of the country, and certainly in the districts which I represent in the North. It occurs to one in considering the problem how splendid it would be if we could harness up these two questions, if we could in some way utilise the labour which must be utilised for building the houses which must be built. Unless you face the difficulty you are never going to find a solution. The housing difficulty, if I have learned rightly from those who sit on my right consists in this, that the private individual cannot build houses which will yield him an economical return. He is probably better off by investing what spare cash he has, if he is lucky enough to have any, in, say, War Loan, than if he embarked on the somewhat hazardous enterprise of house-building. On the other hand, if the State were to shoulder the burden the weight of debt caused thereby might, in the long run, do more harm than good.

One appreciates the difficulty. So far as the municipalities are concerned—I speak coming as the representative of a distressed, necessitous area—they have mortgaged their rates, both in the present and the future, to an extent beyond which one can hardly expect them to go. Therefore one must realise their difficulty. But allowing for that difficulty to the full, it still seems to me a strange proposition, involving an almost Gilbertian situation, that a Government which can not afford to set the men to useful work can still afford to pay them something—an inadequate something, I think—for doing nothing at all. I feel that it would be effrontery for a person in my position, and with my experience, to endeavour to suggest any sort of solution, because if there had been a solution no doubt it would have occurred already to many people. The suggestion which I put forward is put forward with many misgivings, but I am emboldened by the thought that it has been hinted at by my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea (Sir A. Mond), I am not stating that I believe that it is necessarily economically sound. I see great drawbacks to it myself, but I put it forward as a suggestion which merits, I think, consideration and attention.

The suggestion came to me in this way. When I was in my constituency shortly after Christmas, a deputation of the unemployed came to see me, and the substance of what they told me I will state. They said, "We are living to-day in inadequate and insanitary houses. We want new houses. We do not claim to be builders or to be expert in the building trade, but we are ex-soldiers and we claim to be men of vigour and health and intelligence, and men who would far rather be doing something active than sitting in the club all day long doing nothing. Why cannot you allow us to continue to receive the unemployment benefit, and at the same time busy ourselves in doing the rough part of the work involved in building houses, the unskilled labour, and when we have built the houses, let us occupy them? That scheme was a crude one, crude in the sense that I think it could be improved, but it contains possibly the germ of a useful idea. Therefore I think it right to put it before the House. I suggest that one might consider the scheme on these lines: where a new scheme for building houses for the working classes is undertaken—a new scheme would apply as from a given date—and where on that scheme you employ labour additional to the labour already employed in kindred schemes in the district, the builder may receive from the Government a grant of such a sum as the persons he employs would have received by way of unemployment benefit.

If the builder can go to the Employment Exchange and get unemployed to help him in building his houses, and if at the same time by doing this it does not cause to be discharged those men whose job it is, that is to say, if it is clearly additional labour, the State would be no worse off by paying a subsidy to him—it might be an individual or a municipality—than at present it is by payments to men for doing nothing. If the scheme works, it should be tried on a very small scale at the outset. It might mean that the cost of building would be brought down to such an extent as to make it feasible once more to build houses on an economic basis. I would certainly attach this as a fundamental condition—when the houses are built they are to be occupied by the men who built them, by the unemployed, or by the people who would otherwise have been unemployed. We are all desirous that our money should not only be well spent, but that in the spending of it we should encourage habits of industry rather than of idleness. That feeling is shared by the unemployed to the fullest extent. Some such scheme might be, and I trust will be, considered by the Government.

I want next to deal with the question of the rates of wages paid in relief work. Here, again, I agree with the principle which the Government advocates, that in the ideal system there should be three rates of wages—first of all, the rate which is applicable to the district for ordinary economic unskilled work; secondly, the rate applicable to the men employed on relief work; and, thirdly, the sum which the men get weekly either from the unemployment benefit or from the guardians for doing nothing. It is right that there should be those three grades for this reason: It is desirable that the men in each grade should have a definite and clear incentive to get to the grade above. The unemployed man ought to want to get relief work, and the man who is doing relief work ought to want to get ordinary economic work. That would be all very nice if rates of wages were decently high, but rates of wages have fallen to an alarming extent. In my own constituency the unskilled labour, employed on building roads and so on, receives somewhere about £2 10s. to £2 15s. a week. In the case of a married man with four children, the scale which is aimed at by the guardians yields that man 32s. a week. My figures may not be accurate to pence, but they are approximately accurate. If you are to give the man employed on relief work only 75 per cent. of the current rate of wages in an industry, you will give him only 40s., or slightly under. You are then confronted with the position that the man who, through no fault of his own, has for a long period, say 18 months or two years, been accustomed and obliged to live in idleness finds himself with these alternatives: On the one hand he can continue to draw 32s. a week for doing nothing. On the other hand, he can seek relief work and work forty-seven hours a week, and at the end of the week he is only 6s. or 7s. better off.

That is not a very adequate inducement to a man who has been driven to idleness to go back to the paths of industry. I suggest that the right principle to adopt is to allow the local authorities, if they think it proper, to pay full and adequate rates of wages. I believe that then, not only will they get hold of the best class of workmen, but they can see that the work is commensurate with the wage received, and if it is not they can discharge the men. After all, the fallacy that it is cheaper to do relief work by paying a low wage rather than by paying a better wage is the old hoary-headed fallacy that low wages mean economic wealth. Probably the truth is more nearly the other way round. The local authority at West Hartlepool has raised this question, and has asked me to raise it in the House. It has circularised a large number of other municipalities, and in the case of the bodies which have answered a proportion of at least two to one is in favour of allowing the local authority to employ at the full rate of wages instead of 75 per cent. of that rate. I believe it is true that the Government, having realised that in certain cases an amendment was necessary, has since let June, 1922, authorised the Unemployment Grants Committee to waive the stipulation as to 75 per cent. in the case of works authorised after that date. I am inclined to think that that merely accentuates the evil.

I happen to know two works exactly similar in character within a few hundred yards of each other. They differ only in that one was authorised before and the other after 1st June, 1922, with the result that on these works men are being employed at different rates of pay. I am sure I shall have the approval of the House in all quarters when I say that the most obvious mistake—the fundamental mistake—in dealing with the question of unemployment is to allow the unemployed to think that favouritism is being shown; that somebody is being paid at a higher rate than somebody else. If you try to explain to the men that this is because one scheme was approved of before the 1st of June, 1922, and the other after that date, they will tell you the sooner you go to Parliament and get it altered the better. Before I sit down I desire to say a sentence or two on a subject which concerns and deeply interests those whom I have the honour to represent, namely the question of necessitous areas. I sincerely hope we shall not go through the Session without something being done to relieve the necessitous areas. After all it is no fault of ours that we have unemployment in these areas. I represent a constituency whose staple industry is shipbuilding. Perhaps some of us could hazard a very shrewd guess as to why the shipbuilding industry is in its present position, but certainly it is not the fault of anybody in my constituency. Then why are we paying for it? Why are we in such a position that our rates have to go up and up? Our manufacturers in making out their tenders have to take these rates into consideration and we are in this vicious circle, that the higher the rates go, the more difficult it is for the manufacturers in the North-East to get work. I have never heard any argument against the proposition—or if I have, I have been unable to appreciate it—that as a matter of common justice in cases like this, a burden which is purely a national burden should be borne by the State.

I wish to congratulate my hon. and learned friend who has just spoken on the very helpful and timely suggestions he has made to the Government and to the House in dealing with one of the most thorny questions which we have before us, and I should like to amplify some of his remarks. We have just listened to an interesting discussion on a question which is the subject matter of an Amendment to the Address, and although this question is not so fascinating as that of the Near East, although it is more prosaic, it is at the same time more important to millions of people. It is the question of the necessitous areas and the clamant need for some real assistance for them from the Government. I may remind the House that this question has been before it on more than one occasion. Last July a deputation went to the then Prime Minister, supported by at least one member of the present Government, urging the very point which has been so ably put by my hon. and learned Friend, namely, that it is not the fault of the necessitous areas themselves that the unemployment in those districts is so great and is involving such an abnormal burden upon them. My hon. and learned Friend says it is not the fault of the employers on the North-East Coast, with which he and I are both connected. It is not the fault of our shipbuilders that there are no orders for ships, and it is not the fault of the men. It is not through any slackness on their part that orders cannot be obtained. It is a national question and should be dealt with on national lines. May I direct the attention of the President of the Board of Trade to the startling differences prevalent in various parts of the country in rates of unemployment. I find from the last Board of Trade return that whereas the average of unemployment for the whole country, according to the insurance books, is only—I say "only," but it is bad enough at that—12·2 per cent., yet when we come to engineering, and particularly to the North-East Coast, we find there in the month of December 25 per cent. of unemployment. Taking shipbuilding on the North-East Coast in the month of December we have 43·3 per cent. of unemployment, according to the Board of Trade "Labour Gazette" return. We find therefore in that particular district the two staple trades of engineering and shipbuilding, with a rate of unemployment in one case double, and in the other case treble the average for the whole country.

It is said that employment is improving. One may be told, as I have been told, that six boats have been ordered in one yard, but going to that yard we find that only one keel has been laid down. Although orders may be in hand, it will be some months before the full capacity of the yard is employed or before the full capacity of engineering works will be occupied, because it takes some time to get the wheels of industry going. Although the prospects are better we may have to wait months before getting the full advantage in these districts, and there is every reason why we should have special assistance. The House will remember that in 1921 a special measure was passed dealing with this problem in London. That was the result of a deputation to the then Prime Minister and a threat of direct action. The Local Authorities (Financial Provisions) Act was passed dealing with the Metropolitan boroughs. Surely if the provincial boroughs have been more constitutional in their methods of procedure and have not resorted to threats, that is no reason why they should be penalised and denied that which was granted to the Metropolitan boroughs. What was the reason given by the then Minister of Health for making this concession and averaging the Poor Law charges in the Metropolitan area? The right hon. Gentleman said there were such differences between the rates in different parts of the area as, for instance, a 10s. 6d. rate in the City of London compared with a 22s. 10d. rate in Poplar. It was because of that great disparity that the Measure was brought in to equalise the burden over the Metropolitan area.

What is sound logic for the Metropolitan area is equally sound logic for the larger area of industrial England. Geographical situation does not enter into the question of the principle. It may enter into the question of its application and the particular machinery required, but much greater disparities can be shown in the provinces. There is Merthyr Tydvil with 27s. 8½d. as compared with Oxford's 8s. 7d. A most useful publication issued by the Ministry of Health shows the marked differences between various localities for common charges, and those differences are not in any measure due to the defaults or defects of those particular districts. I may remind the President of the Board of Trade of some illustrations from this alphabetical list with which doubtless he is already acquainted. There is Birmingham with 17s. and Bournemouth with 9s. There is Bradford with 16s. and Blackpool with 8s. 3d. There is Halifax with 23s. 5d. and Hastings with 11s. 1d. One could go on right through the length of the alphabet finding these differences which are hitting most inequitably certain areas, although they are in reference to common purposes. As a result of the deputation last July to the Prime Minister a committee was appointed representing the necessitous boroughs, and a formula was drawn up whereby machinery might be adopted for assisting these particular areas. It was recognised that the same machinery would not apply as applied in the Metropolitan boroughs. It was suggested that the principle underlying what was known as the Necessitous School Areas Grant might well be applied to this particular case, and the formula submitted was on the lines that, if you take the poor rate for the pre-War period, 75 per cent. of the extra burden due to the abnormal unemployment caused by the War should be borne by the State and 25 per cent. by the locality. That was the formula submitted to the Government of that day, which, I believe, had the consideration of the Cabinet Com- mittee, and which, if I am not incorrectly informed, is still before this Government.

I appeal to the Government that they should realise how exceedingly serious this question is in these industrial areas and how, as my hon. and learned Friend has just stated, it is throttling industry, it is putting a burden upon districts which it is impossible for them to bear, and it is doing a great deal to retard their recovery. On whatever side of the House we may sit, we all realise that the one satisfactory, permanent solution is a revival of trade and industry, but how can you expect such a revival when manufacturing charges are burdened to this abnormal extent? If we turn to the reports of various commercial undertakings, we find illustrations of this. The chairman of a large company in my district, Messrs. Bolckow, Vaughan and Co., speaking at their annual meeting the other day, gave illustrations of this point. He said that whereas the poor rate in 1914 averaged on their works a standing charge of 5·1d. per ton of steel produced, last year that figure had increased to 3s. 2d. a ton. In the "Times" the other day there was a letter with illustrations from Sheffield, where the increase was even more extraordinary. Taking the production of steel tyres, one works had shown that whereas in 1914 the poor rate charge was 6d. per ton of steel tyres produced, last year it amounted to 18s. 11d. I had similar figures taken out from another works in my own district, where the local rate charges were 8d. per ton in 1914, as compared with 5s. 4d. last year. I therefore submit that there is a very strong case indeed on equity, and that it is not beyond the wit of man to devise a practical scheme whereby these burdens can be more justly placed.

It has been said in previous Debates that these districts in War time made big profits and that therefore they must not complain when things are bad, but, as the Government well know, these districts themselves, as local authorities, did not have any reserve fund built up out of those profits. I submit that the people who gained the profits in the War years are not, in these days of modern industry, necessarily the people who lived in those districts. Profits are spread throughout the length and breadth of the country. Take the list of shareholders of any big industrial firm, and you will find that the great bulk of the capital on which the profits are paid is not held by people who live in that particular district. They have got the War profits, and that is the reason why, now that the distress has come, they, as national payers of Income Tax, should share with the poorer districts some of the profits which were made in the years of plenty. Therefore, I appeal in all seriousness to the Government that, in the interests of trade itself, they should realise that something should be done. Do not let them be led away by the suggestion that trade is reviving, and that therefore no help is necessary.

As I have already said, it will be some weeks or months before the full effect of that trade goes into the pockets of the wage-earners and of the ratepayers. Resources have been exhausted after a long period of unemployment, and you have before you at the end of April another gap period under the Unemployment Insurance Act. We are now in the fourth special period, and all covenanted and uncovenanted benefit under the existing Act will begin to come to an end by the beginning of April. You have from April to June, nearly three months, when, under the Unemployment Act as it stands at present, and until and unless it is amended, the whole burden of relief will be taken from that Act and put on to the local ratepayers. That is a big extra burden which is staring local authorities in the face, and that is an additional reason why the Government, whatever they may do to amend the Insurance Act, should also make some grants to necessitous areas, which are being crushed and broken by burdens which they cannot afford to bear.

I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Mr. T. Thomson), who has just spoken, and I are very much indebted to you, Mr. Speaker, for giving us an opportunity of saying a few words on this very important question. There have been many questions raised in this Debate in the last two days, and it appears to me that it is almost impossible to discuss the question of the want of employment without bringing in the question of the Poor Law authorities. The Government at the present time have got all the information that is necessary, because that information was presented to the late Prime Minister as far back as last July, when my right hon. Friend the Member for West Swansea (Sir A. Mond) was Minister of Health. At that deputation we had delegates representing about 150 Poor Law authorities from the different parts of the country, and every phase of the question was then put before the late Prime Minister. If I remember aright, one of the most forcible speeches out of the whole delegation was made by the present Postmaster-General. Therefore, if he has the same amount of sympathy now that he had then, I hope he will use his good offices in trying to bring pressure to bear upon the Government to carry out the ideas that he put forward on that occasion.

Some of us are absolutely compelled from time to time, and at every opportunity, to bring this question before the House. The position in many of the localities is very deplorable, and in regard to the Poor Law authority of West Ham, I am not in a position to cite the extra cost incurred in the steel and other industries mentioned by the hon. Member for Middlesbrough, because we have no steel and iron works so far as the area of West Ham is concerned, but we know that the Borough of West Ham is one of the highest rated local authorities in the country. I think the hon. Member for Silvertown (Mr. J. Jones) mentioned last night that the rate in the Borough of West Ham is about 26s. in the £. What applies to West Ham, I think, applies to East Ham and to some of the other local authorities that go to make up what is known as the West Ham Poor Law Area. I am convinced that unless the Government are prepared to come along and make a grant to necessitous areas, these areas will be absolutely driven and compelled to refuse to administer the Poor Law and pay out the amount of money they are paying now to unemployed families.

As a matter of fact, one of the most influential members of the West Ham Board of Guardians, a man who owns a good deal of property in the Borough of West Ham, made a statement to me that, so far as he was concerned, he should try to persuade all his colleagues on the West Ham Board of Guardians to pass a resolution to refuse to administer the Poor Law on account of the tremendous amount of money that is now being paid out in the West Ham Union. He said, quite frankly, "I know what I am talking about, I know what it means, and I know what it will mean if I am in a position to persuade the Poor Law authority in West Ham to do that." I think it goes without saying that you know what would happen if the Borough of West Ham, or any other Poor Law authority, refused to administer the Poor Law or to pay out unemployment relief to the families of the unemployed. You would have plundering and wrecking, and property would be destroyed. This particular individual recognised all that, but he said it appeared to him that the Government of the day were not prepared to do anything until something very serious broke out where this heavy burden of Poor Law was practically breaking the backs of the ratepayers and working classes in general.

After all, it is only a question of money. As we have said on more than one occasion, you have got the power if you have got the will. You can do all that we are asking by putting your heads together, and by trying to persuade the Treasury to make a grant, and the grant we are asking is not a very great deal. I do not think there is any necessity to remind my right hon. Friend on the Front Bench, who knows all about the conditions so far as the trade unions are concerned. He knows the amount of money that has been paid out by all the unions of this country in unemployment benefit. He knows that, collectively, during the last two years the trade unions of this country have paid over £6,000,000 out of their own money, subscribed by their own members, and in consequence of the heavy burdens that were placed upon the financial resources of the trade unions in many cases they were compelled to cut away the benefits because they had no funds out of which to pay benefits any longer. In addition to that, the 43 Poor Law areas have paid out in unemployment benefit for four half-years ending Michaelmas, 1922, £8,240,922. The position has got worse in consequence of a very large number of men and women, who have received their 12 weeks' unemployment benefit since last November, getting no more unemployment benefit from the Exchanges. Every week men and women in this position will be gradually cut away, and hundreds and thousands will be deprived of their unemployment benefit, leaving only one avenue open to them, and that is the Poor Law authority.

My right hon. Friend knows, of course, the method that has been adopted by the guardians in the various parts of the country with the men and women who have been receiving unemployment benefit. That has been taken into account when granting poor relief to the families. All that is taken away, and the result will be that the Poor Law authorities will be compelled to give the full scale every week. I know there is a difference in the method of granting Poor Law relief to unemployed families. I do not know that the West Ham relief is any more generous than some of the other local authorities in the country. I know there has been a quarrel between the Department of the Minister of Labour and the Poor Law area authorities because they want to insist upon what is known as the Mond scale being carried out, and our Poor Law authorities refuse to carry out that scale. Personally I do not think there is a great deal of difference between the Mond scale and that paid out by West Ham Poor Law authorities, and what has been paid out by many of the local authorities of the country. In addition to the amount I have already cited as having been paid out by the trade unions, about 8½ millions, in round figures, have been paid out by these 43 necessitous areas. They have borrowed money from the Government. I have not the amount in my mind, but I do know that a very large number of Poor Law authorities have been drawing very heavy overdrafts, and some of the banks have already threatened to refuse to give any more overdrafts. It amounts to thousands and thousands of pounds. I will give three typical cases out of the 43 I have here. In the case of Birmingham, in the four half-years ending Michaelmas, 1922, the amount is £1,046,205; Sheffield, £848,397; Ecclesall, which is practically part and parcel of Sheffield, £380,035; and there are many other Poor Law authorities who have paid out pro rata to the amount of the population they represent. I will cite one or two authorities to show the amount of Poor Law rate they have to pay. Bedwelty has a Poor Law rate of 11s. 8d. in the £; Ecclesall, 9s. 9·76d.: Sheffield, 11s. 8d.; Walsall, 6s. 7d.; and West Ham, 7s. 8·66d., and so on.

I could go on giving illustrations for the 43 local authorities, but I do not think it is any good for us to make any more energetic appeals than we have made. We have made the most energetic appeals we can make. We have to come to the Department like a cripple at the Cross to beg for a crust, because the burdens on the local authorities are almost unbearable. They cannot go on for ever. In addition to the amount they have already paid from their own rates, West Ham has borrowed more than £500,000—£300,000 in the first place, and £250,000 in the second place. That money has already gone, and they are in the same position as before In the name of common sense, how can they go on paying this burden? We have said this over and over again, and this is not a party question, because there are Members on the other side—for instance, my hon. Friend the Member for Upton (Mr. Margesson) and others—who are affected, perhaps not to the same degree as we are at West Ham, but, at any rate, they are affected, and pressure has been brought to bear upon them by all their local authorities to bring the matter before the Government with a view of getting a grant.

If you pay out the amount that has been suggested by my hon. Friend of 75 per cent. over and above the 6d. rate, how much is it going to cost you? According to our table—and there is a copy in the office of the Minister of Health—the suggested Government grant to cover all the 43 areas is £2,296,165. That is a mere drop in the bucket, in comparison with the amount of money you have been wickedly throwing away in other parts. We do make an earnest appeal to the Government—and I hope my right hon. Friend will make representations to the Government, as I think he will—to see whether they cannot come to the relief of these 43 local authorities, because if not, we shall be banging at their doors all the time until we get it. We are simply bound to get something.

Next Tuesday there is going to be a conference in one of the Committee rooms upstairs. The delegates will not be Members from this side of the House only. I fancy there will be more Members from the opposite benches. We do not want to make this a party question at all. We have said over and over again that it is not a party question. We do not want to make party capital out of it. As a matter of fact, if the right hon. Gentleman opposite, on behalf of the Government, gives us something it will be a feather in their cap. If he can do that, I will eulogise the Government to any extent, and I will be one of the proudest of men and glad to do it. What we cannot get by moral suasion—how can we get it otherwise? We cannot use physical force. We cannot go to the Treasury, so to speak, and get hold of the Treasury by the nose. We cannot be charged on this side of the House with having made violent speeches on this question to-night. I could make just as violent a speech as any man. No doubt of that. But where would it carry me? Nowhere. This is a practical question. I hope that hon. Members on all sides of the House will take up this question earnestly and energetically, and bring pressure to bear upon the Government for this comparatively small sum of money, less than £3,000,000, to get us out of the serious difficulties in which unemployment has placed us.

I will not long detain the House in going into the case of the necessitous areas which have been dealt with so fully by the hon. Member who has just sat down and by the hon. Member for West Middlesbrough (Mr. T. Thomson), but deal with my constituency in Sheffield, one of the most heavily-rated areas in the country at the present time. It would be neglect of duty on the part of myself and other hon. Members if we did not draw the attention of the Government to cases of the kind and require from them immediate action in the direction we have indicated. We in Sheffield are exceedingly disappointed that, after all the pressure which has been put upon the Government, with all the facts and figures which have been brought to their notice, that there was no mention at all of this particular side of the case in the gracious Speech from the Throne, whilst at the same time there was definite mention of similar problems—in the opinion of us not quite so urgent—in regard to the rating question in agricultural areas.

In one's constituency in Sheffield, with all its burdens, the people have been not only unemployed but overburdened with rates, and while this is so, the Government of the day are talking about relieving the rating problems in agricultural constituencies and saying nothing at all about the special burdens of the industrial areas. I am perfectly certain what their opinion would be of His Majesty's Government at the present moment, if asked for it. It is not, as has been said, that we want to make party capital out of the question. The urgent necessity is to get immediate relief for those who are suffering in places like Sheffield. For the life of me I cannot imagine that the Government have seriously considered the problem in the case of a city like Sheffield, or in cases mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Mr. Thorne). I wonder if the Government realise that in Sheffield from March, 1921, to November, 1922, in the two Poor Law unions they have paid in out-relief to the unemployed alone, apart from their other relief, a sum of £1,310,000? Since that period, although the number of unemployed has dropped very slightly, Sheffield is still continuing to pay out-relief at the rate of £10,000 per week. They have all the awful prospect mentioned by the hon. Member for West Middlesbrough of that burden increasing if the Government do not make really adequate provision for dealing with the question of the 12 weeks' gap which commences in April.

Whilst we join heartily in the association to put pressure upon the Government for the various constituencies concerned, we want that relief especially in regard to Sheffield. As the President of the Board of Trade knows, the leaders of the armament industry in Sheffield actually had a consultation with the Government some time ago as to whether they would be able to keep going the plant which was essential to turning out heavy armaments—armour plating, heavy guns, and the like. The Government in effect told them to keep the place idle. The plant is unsuitable for dealing with any other kind of production, but the Government have made no special contribution to Sheffield for keeping that plant idle all this time. Not only are they faced with this awful burden week by week, but with their plant entirely unproductive the workmen of Sheffield are kept without work.

Take, for instance, the analogous instance of Krupps at Essen. Up to, at any rate, the period of the French occupation of the Ruhr—and I daresay even at the present time—Krupps' organisation at Essen has been practically transformed for the purposes of peace production. I heard an hon. Member describe a short while ago what he saw at Essen, how they were pouring out for peace purposes orders for all over Europe. On the other hand, with regard to converting the steel industry of Sheffield to peace production, this is largely being held up by the fact that the owners are urged, indirectly at any rate, to keep their plant intact for the kind of production the Government may at some time require. At the present time they have enormous rates upon the plant as well as upon their buildings. That means that they are often in regard to contracts left in the lurch. Only the other day we had the case of a contract. There was competition between Sheffield and other towns in the country. On account of the enormous charges for poor rates upon the firms concerned, they were not able to quote at anything like the figure given by the firms whose burden was not so heavy. This in effect meant that because they have a smaller number of unemployed in these other places and have not been so adversely affected by the after-War slump, they are able to go on securing more and more work, while in places where, as at Sheffield, unemployment has been more prevalent, they are being more severely handicapped because the Government does not come to their relief, and the financial pressure upon the ratepayers and upon industry leaves the thing at a point where we have little hope of curing the unemployment that at present exists.

We are almost tired of putting this question before the Government. During the last short Session we not only pleaded this case in the House, but we met the Minister as a body of private Members. I think it is about time that we had a Minister of Health on the Treasury Bench to answer our case. I hope the present Minister will be successful in gaining a seat or else give way to someone who can be responsible here for that Department. I hope the Government will provide a live Minister of Health before very long. I suggest to the Government that this is a question which brooks no further delay. The Minister of Health in his last letter said that for some time a Cabinet Committee had been considering the question of grants to necessitous areas. I want to know how long they are going to deliberate and keep us knocking at the door in order to relieve burdens that are becoming more and more intolerable, and are likely to get far worse. When I visualise some of the scenes I have witnessed in my own constituency of these unemployed who have to pay out of their poverty sometimes 1s. and sometimes 2s. 6d. weekly to the rating authorities, and when I see the complacency with which the Government treat this question, I almost despair.

We are making this last effort and we ask, now that they are being urged, not merely from the Labour Benches, but from all parts of the House, that these necessitous areas should have help at once. Surely they will see the wisdom of what we are putting forward, and for the sake even of stability and general security in the towns for which we are speaking, they will take immediate action. There is a limit to human endurance. The Chief Constable at Sheffield has paid a very great compliment to these unemployed men for the patience and endurance which has been shown by over 30,000 unemployed in the City of Sheffield, and if the Government are not going to do something quickly in order to end the awful stress of the present situation, we shall be having some of these men stepping over the border. We do not want that sort of thing, and it would be a much better policy for the Government to meet the situation as a national responsibility, by relieving the areas which are suffering so much.

9.0 P.M.

In addressing the House for the first time I think I may claim a double measure of indulgence, because there are many hon. Members of this House in regard to whom I was once a critic, and they were the victims, and they are now the critics. For this reason I feel almost glad that these benches are comparatively empty. I wish to make a few remarks on the two subjects which must necessarily be of intense interest to all of us, namely, housing and unemployment. For nearly two years, as the representative of a small urban authority, I was chairman of a housing committee and we worked very hard at our plan. We had all classes represented on that committee. We got our land at I a very reasonable figure and our plans were passed, but finally our scheme was rejected because the cost was too high. At that time we could not get tenders for less than £800 per house, but now we can get them for about half that amount, and the reason why the cost was so high originally was the high cost of materials and labour. The present need is housing, and hon. Members opposite can go a long way towards supplying that need by urging the necessity not of labour at lower wages, but of full labour in building the houses. A remark was made by the hon. Member for the Hartlepools (Mr. Jowitt) which seems to me to be of great importance, and that is that there are 200,000 men in the building trade out of employment, and the necessity of connecting those 200,000 men with the building of the houses that are needed. We are told that the question is complicated by the Rent Restrictions Act. It is said that you cannot have houses until you decontrol, and, on the other hand, it is said that if you decontrol you cannot have the houses because the builders will not come in. I know there is a very great deal of uneasiness amongst the classes most affected by the present dearth of houses, mostly among the middle and the lower classes.

In dealing with this question of the Rent (Restrictions) Act, I suggest that the Government should be very careful in regard to adopting the suggestions of the Onslow Committee which are likely to make it almost impossible for the small tenants to obtain houses. It might be well to adopt a period of continued control coupled with some encouragement to the private builder to come in in order to enable them to produce the houses, and afterwards we might have complete decontrol.

I have listened to many speeches from hon. Members opposite, and they seem to me to believe that all human ills can be cured by the abolition of private enterprise and the substitution of public control. As I look across the Floor of the House I see in front of me a large number of living proofs of the fallacy of that argument, because one could scarcely find a more stalwart band of individualists than hon. Members opposite.

The speeches of the Leader of the Opposition are always attractive, as attractive intellectually as they seem to be unsound politically. At a meeting of the Independent Labour Party lately the hon. Member (Mr. R. MacDonald) is reported to have given tramways as an instance of successful public control. I am quite content to take tramways as an instance of public control, and compare them with motor buses which are excellent examples of public enterprise. The tramways are cumbrous and slow and they must run in a particular groove; they obstruct the traffic and very frequently they do not pay. [An HON. MEMBER: "You have never been to Glasgow."] Yes, I have been to Glasgow, and I have ridden in the tramcars there. The motor buses are excellent examples of private enterprise. They are speedy and convenient, and they can strike out new routes. The means of transport in this country have been greatly improved by the short services of small vehicles which I am glad to say have been started by ex-service men; and we heartily wish them luck. You can imagine, if transport were completely controlled by the Government, how difficult it would be for these ex-service men to start their services and how the public means of communication would suffer. It seems to me that hon. Members opposite are engaged in a hopeless struggle, not with us, but with human nature and economic law. If you destroy the principle of private enterprise, you destroy the mainspring of industry. In one of the opening speeches of last Session some lines of Burns were quoted with great effect. May I remind hon. Members opposite of these lines: noon was so completely misrepresented by the hon. Member who followed him. I have been in Canada twice, and as I passed through the great spaces of that wonderful Dominion the thought kept recurring, "Why can we not transplant into these free spaces some of the people of our towns, especially the young, who are gasping for life and air and for whom we feel the deepest sympathy?"

There is unemployment in Toronto.

There may be unemployment in Toronto, but it would not affect such a scheme as that outlined by the hon. Member for Bournemouth (Lieut.-Colonel Croft). It is that this country should obtain empty fertile tracts in the Dominions and proceed to develop them with railways and everything necessary for Civilisation. If that were done, it would not only benefit the Dominion, but it would also benefit this country. It would attract all classes out of employment, doctors, schoolmasters, engineers, as well as that class we are now so urgently asked to assist, namely, the agricultural labourer. There are some 200,000 boys and girls just over school age who are out of employment. I was fortunate enough to send one of these to Western Australia. He was a first-rate boy, and I got the Church Army Settlement in Essex to take him. They trained him, and, finding that he was the right sort, they sent him out to a chosen home—a farmer's—in Western Australia, and I have a letter from him saying that he delights in the life and hopes that his two younger brothers will soon follow him.

I know there are defects in working of the Government scheme and that some people have come back, but it is a fact that some thousands of the people of this country have been settled overseas under that Empire Settlement Act, and I appeal to hon. Members oppposite to take a wide and long view, to look to the future, and not to represent this migration from this country as a plot on the part of the employers. I am not an employer. My only interest is to try and do some little good for my country. I appeal to hon. Members, instead of representing this migration as a plot against the working men of the country, to approach the question in that way and to look upon the scheme as a means that will benefit those who go, benefit the Dominions, and benefit this country. The trade that we do per head of population with our Dominions is seven, eight, nine and even 10 times as great as the trade that we do per head of population with foreign countries. Therefore, any new colonists that we send to the overseas Dominions become a centre of trade. Let me add one more word on what seems to me the enormously important principle of cooperation in industry or of profit sharing. If only the trade unions and the employers would come together and whole-heartedly adopt this principle, I believe that a new era would dawn in industry. If trade unionists, instead of crying "Down with the capitalist," would substitute the watchword, "Every man a capitalist," then I believe there would be a new spirit in industry and a new hope for the people.

Several hon. Members rose.

Sir Alfred Mond.

There will have to be an end put to this. It is most unfair. The right hon. Gentleman has been here only a couple of minutes. We want fair play.

I do not wish to interfere with hon. Members who want to speak, but I would point out that hon. Members on those benches have occupied a very large part of the time of the House.

We, unlike you, occupy the benches. Do not insult us in the way you did last time.

After all, I am as much entitled to speak as, and more entitled to speak than, the hon. Member.

No more entitled at all.

If hon. Members will allow me to make my speech—

You should sit and wait your turn.

Is there not a Standing Order that a Member rising to make his maiden speech shall have preference?

No, there is no Standing Order. It is the usual custom, but in a House where there are so many new Members it is almost impossible always to follow it.

I regret very much if I interfere with an hon. Member making his maiden speech, but I was not aware that any hon. Member rose to do so. If hon. Members will allow me to address a few remarks to the House, there will be plenty of time for him to speak. We have had a very interesting Debate, and a considerable number of points, with which I personally had a good deal to do when I was Minister of Health, have been raised. Nobody realises more fully than I do the difficulties of the necessitous areas and the heavy burdens which have been placed upon their shoulders by increasing poor rates owing to unemployment. We examined the question and tried to find a formula which would apply fairly and reasonably to all the various areas, but, with the best desire to deal with the question and after giving it the most careful consideration, I cannot say that we succeeded or that anybody succeeded in finding a formula which was not full of serious defects. I can only hope that our successors will be more successful. There is no doubt that the question is very difficult of solution. Hon. Members have referred to the coming gap in the Unemployment Insurance Act. I would like to say that in my opinion the Government undoubtedly could and ought to assist local authorities by not allowing such a gap to take place. There is another subject with which I was very much concerned for a considerable time; that of housing. I came in at a moment of difficulty towards the end of the scheme to endeavour to reduce expenditure to something like economic lines. [An HON. MEMBER:" And you starved the children!"] I do not know how it can be said I starved the children because I reduced the price of the houses. [An HON. MEMBER: "You stopped building!"] At any rate, I got erected a considerable number of houses at a very much reduced cost. We were considering just before the last election a scheme which I put forward based on the principle of giving a fixed amount per house to the local authorities and sharing with them the loss on economic rents which must occur at the present cost if people at existing wage rates are to be enabled to live in them. I want to know is a similar scheme going to be put forward by the Government in its forthcoming legislation? Another question I would like to ask is, what is the number of houses that have been completed under the schemes now in operation, what number are still in course of erection, and how many houses have yet to be commenced?

It is generally recognised by those who have studied this question that, in addition to assisting the local authorities, we ought also to endeavour to bring back into active operation that large private building industry, which before the War was mainly responsible for the erection of houses in this country. I would like to ask if any steps are contemplated by which, through the local authorities, credit facilities can be given so as to bring this building industry into existence again and also to assist people who want to build or buy houses on the long-credit system. Also, is anything proposed to be done to stimulate the activities of building societies, some of which I believe are more ready to assist in this matter. There are further steps which might be adopted to deal with this extremely difficult question. There is, for instance, the suggestion whether it would not be possible to utilise by some method the unemployment benefits for those engaged in the building industry to enable the local authorities to erect houses more cheaply. I remember that the Birmingham Corporation sent up a deputation to the Ministry to discuss this very question, and it is one I think which ought to be gone into and which was, in fact, proposed to be gone into in connection with the larger scheme I adumbrated the last time I spoke on the subject of unemployment. The general question is whether or not we should take steps to enable men who are drawing the benefit as long as they do nothing to use that benefit in order to provide employment. It is a rather difficult and somewhat complicated scheme, but I think it is not impracticable or impossible, although it needs careful safeguarding. At the present time we have a number of people drawing unemployment benefit. They are entitled to do it because they have paid for it. If a man takes on any work, he loses the advantage of the benefit under the present law. Is it not possible to enable a man to utilise that benefit to provide himself with work rather than to be out of work? I believe that such a scheme is feasible, and I have taken the trouble to have it worked out at some length and in some detail.

When I say it would have to be carefully safeguarded, it is obvious that what must be carefully safeguarded is that none of this money should be used for depressing the general level of wages. That must be made quite clear, but if through the Employment Exchanges it could be made possible for men to surrender, either individually or collectively, their benefit to an employer, on the condition that he is not displacing labour, but employing more labour, is not paying less than the district rate, and is not interfering in any way with the present trade union conditions, I think a scheme of that kind would probably stimulate trade and diminish the general cost of production. We are now at a point when the margin between the price at which orders will be given and the cost of production is in many cases very narrow, and if we can, by what may be called a subsidy on wages—which possibly to some extent it may be—diminish the cost of production and utilise the large sum which is being spent on keeping people out of work to give people work, such a scheme might help to solve the difficult position in which we are. I was rather sorry to hear the Prime Minister use yesterday a phrase of which I took note at the time. He said: adduced, but we are faced now with a fourth year of an exceptional degree of unemployment. We are all glad to know that it is diminishing, but it is diminishing at a relatively slow rate. With the condition of Europe at the present moment rather worse than better, with the breakdown of the attempts that have been made to arrive at some more rational basis, we are more than ever called upon to look at this question in a bold and even exceptional manner. I quite agree that we ought to be patient, and the period for which patience has been shown by those who have been suffering is wonderful. I think that every section of the House equally sympathises with them in what they are going through, and everyone is really anxious to find practical remedies.

As long as they do not cost anything.

Not at all. We have already spent a large amount of money, and if money is the only thing, I think it ought to be found; but what we want to do is to find work, to enable people to get back to the industries in which they are accustomed to work. We have had some discussion on the question of oversea settlement, and I am glad to see, from the Report of the Committee, that some serious progress is being made in that matter. I do not want to go into it now, because it has been already fairly fully dealt with, but there is another aspect of the question which has been raised before, and which I myself have raised on more than one occasion, but which I want to raise again. That is the question of using our national credit to develop our Empire. If we have got anything, even with the Heavy burden of taxation that is imposed upon us, and with the number of people that we have out of employment, we have got national credit. At the present time we have the extraordinary phenomenon that large amounts of capital are lying practically idle in our banks, while countries all over the world are asking for capital for development. There are plenty of opportunities for development throughout the British Empire which would provide employment in this country, and markets for goods made in this country. All that it is necessary for us to do is to take courage and break away from past traditions, even taking some risk, in using the credit of this country in order to assist those schemes. That would mean orders for rails, locomotives, the development of production and the interchange of goods. While Europe remains in such a disturbed condition that it is impossible for us to get back our markets there, the only possible remedy is, not to turn the world upside down and destroy what exists, but to develop new markets in which our products can be sold.

Anyone who has studied the Acworth Report on the Indian railways sees there a picture of a country lacking in trans port, in which there is room for an almost indefinite profitable development of railways and transportation. If the Indian Government cannot at the moment finance those railways, why should not the Government of this country step into the breach? I remember discussing this matter a considerable time ago, and I think it would be possible to make some arrangement by which the Indian Government could relieve the difficulties of Sheffield, which were alluded to with great truth by an hon. Member a little while ago. It is not by taking money from the Treasury and handing it to the Poor Law guardians that you are going to in crease the wealth of the country, but by taking people who are at present out of employment and putting them into employment. These schemes are perfectly feasible and economically sound, but they require a certain amount of courage, and, perhaps, the taking of a little risk. Let us remember, however, that we are spending, in one way and another, something like £120,000,000 a year on unemployment in this country for nothing. Surely it is time—

It is very foolish.

I think it is foolish, and surely, in these directions which I have briefly indicated, steps could be taken. Our system has not come to an end. If it had come to an end, it would be time for us to abandon it. If there were a better system I should be glad to adopt it, but a better system has not yet been produced. In the only country in which the proposals of some hon. Members have been tried they have produced more unemployment.

How do you know if it has never been tried?

It has been tried in Russia. I will not say that it is conclusive—[ Interruption ]—but in Russia they certainly tried to nationalise the industries, and now they are denationalising them as quickly as they can, and asking the people from whom the industries were taken kindly to come back and run them.

Is it not the case that the right hon. Gentleman, when he was Minister of Health, delivered a very impressive argument in this House to show that his Department could build houses more cheaply than private enterprise?

I think the hon. Member is referring to a statement I made when I was First Commissioner of Works. It is quite correct that I was at that time building houses quite as cheaply as, and perhaps more cheaply than, they were at that time being built by private enterprise. But that is not relevant to any argument I have used or which I am impressing on the House at this moment. I do not want to argue on the relative value of State or individual enterprise, but I have put forward ideas and suggestions which might very well receive the earnest attention and sympathy of the Government. The President of the Board of Trade is neither lacking in business acumen or courage and I hope he will not only be sympathetic but that he and his colleagues will go forward on lines which have been considered more than once. The time for execution has now arrived. I hope the Postmaster-General, who recently adumbrated excellent schemes for the development of canals, which will be of the utmost value to the country, will use his influence with the Government in order to turn some of our unemployed and our surplus capital on to work in order to get these waterways carried out. We have had enough deflation and we might without any risk return to a little inflation. That is generally admitted, and the question arises what schemes ought we to arrange to finance.

I have sat here for six and a half hours and I have risen on every occasion and, except for the fact that there is no other way so far as I know that I can have an opportunity of addressing the House, I certainly should not have stood up on this occasion because it seems to be a very strange arrangement that hon. Members should need to rise, as it were, in competition with each other after sitting here hour after hour as we have done. That is merely a preliminary observation on one of the many things which seem to require to be changed. [An HON. MEMBER: "The whole place wants shutting up!"] Perhaps it might not be a bad thing if the whole place was shut up so far as any effective benefit to the vast bulk of our people is concerned, though I should not have ventured to make a suggestion of that kind. My first regret is that in the King's Speech there is no reference to the Representation of the People Bill, and I very much regret that there is no statement with regard to the prospect of women voters being placed upon the same footing as men. I represent a large industrial division in Lanarkshire and we have a large number of women who in these very distressing days are endeavouring to keep their households going. They are the mothers of children. They are in great difficulties. They are contributing to the taxation of the country and I hope at no very distant date the Government will make provision for them to exercise the franchise on the same basis as men are exercising it. In the Rutherglen Division in particular, and throughout the West of Scotland in general, we have 60,000 or 80,000 men and women who have been unemployed for from three months to 2½ years, and I have here letters from the secretaries of the various parish councils in Blantyre, in Cambuslang and Rutherglen, appealing to us to use our influence to make this unemployed problem a national and not a local problem, and I have promised, as I did at the General Election, that I will do my best to serve the interests of the people who have placed their confidence in me. I contested the seat as an avowed Socialist and Pacifist—I hope there is no harm in making a confession like that—and I am here to-night speaking for the first time and endeavouring to fulfil the promises I made there, because I should feel ashamed of myself if I endeavoured to be returned to this House and then proved false to the promises I have made.

With regard to the housing problem, I have here a document, the data of which I collected myself, assisted by a Justice of the Peace in Cambuslang, and it contains in my judgment a very shocking statement of the housing condition which prevails. I will read the first item: very serious condition of affairs, and I hope the Government will endeavour to deal with this problem on some new system, such as we are advocating to-night.

I want to deal with the question of unemployment, the problem of our food supply and the question of agriculture in relation to this matter. I hope the House agrees that the problem of unemployment is most urgent and dangerous from the point of view of the national life, that there are limits to the powers of endurance of men, and that it is a, very serious condition of affairs which prevails to-day. I would suggest the Socialist ideal, in the first place, as a solution of the problem. If the land of the nation belonged to the people of the nation we could solve this problem of unemployment in a comparatively short time. The nation has the right to use its raw material on such lines as commend themselves to the well-being of the community, which well-being is paramount over the private interests of any section of the community. Vested interests ought not to stand in the way of the well-being of the community. I do not suppose that anybody seriously contests that principle. During the late War men were compelled to serve in the Army and Navy because it was held that the interests of the community were paramount over the interests of individuals. If this principle applies in times of war, it applies with equal force in times of peace in a great national crisis. It cannot be disputed that man forms society, its laws and institutions, and man can reform society upon any basis that man desires it should be placed. We have reached a stage in the evolution of society when some great fundamental change should be made if civilisation is to be preserved. What is it that marks the distinction between what is called civilised society and barbarism? It is, surely, the fact that in a highly civilised State we have an assurance and a guarantee, without the insecurity that prevails at the present time.

If the Government is really anxious and if the community at large are really anxious to solve the problem of unemployment, it can be solved upon the lines of getting our people back to agriculture. As an ideal, it is highly desirable that we should not be dependent upon other nations, whether they be our Dominions overseas or other countries, for our foodstuffs, if they can be produced at home. They can be produced at home. That is a view to which many hon. Members dissented yesterday and to-day. In 1856 there were over 4,000,000 acres of land in this country growing wheat. At the present time I believe the figure is under 2,000,000 acres, with a population probably double what it was in 1856. In travelling from Glasgow, a week ago, a distance of over 400 miles, I spent a considerable part of the time occupied by the journey in observing how many people within sight of the railway were actually working on the land. I only saw on the journey from Glasgow to London 12 people working on the land. [ Laughter. ] I should have thought that that was not an observation to be laughed at. I should have thought that it revealed a very serious state of affairs.

The land which was cultivated 60 or 65 years ago could be brought into cultivation again, and if it could grow wheat 60 years ago it could grow wheat now. The hon. and gallant Member for Reading (Major Cadogan) suggested that the surface of the land was limited and that we could not add to it. I entirely disagree with that statement. The yield of the land per acre has continually increased during the last 800 years. In Britain it is as high now as it has ever been, though it is not as high here as in Scotland, and not as high in Britain as in Denmark, Germany, Holland and France, although some of these countries have an inferior soil and an inferior climate so far as this problem is concerned. Therefore, I assert, and I do not think that it can be disputed, that the land which formerly yielded crops for a population only half the size of our present population, could again produce food for our people, if brought under the plough. We should, thereby, dispose of the idea of emigration as a solution of the problem of unemployment.

But if that in itself were not sufficient we know that there are new methods which can be introduced into agriculture which would add to the yield from that source. In the Lothians of Scotland 80 years ago the Marquis of Tweeddale introduced the system of deep cultivation. He cultivated the soil to the depth of from 16 to 20 inches, and, as a result, at the end of a few years he was getting, if my memory serves me aright, four times the yield which he previously obtained from 1,200 acres of land under the old methods. There is a House of Lords Report in existence, according to a statement by the late Cardinal Manning in a pamphlet which he sent to me as far back as 1887. He quotes from the report, published in 1886, two statements based upon the authority of two eminent agriculturists. The first was to the effect that it was estimated that of 20,000,000 acres of land in England only 3,000,000 had as yet been adequately drained, and the second was that of the land in England one one-fifth has as yet been treated by agriculture.

If those two statements are correct, I submit that we have a solution of the unemployed problem there, and that without going beyond the shores of our own land, if we brought this land into cultivation, the three million acres that have been drained, and the 17 million which at that time had not been drained, that is the kind of work which men, whether they are skilled or unskilled, could perform. It would be a permanent improvement and a source of national wealth for all time to come; and if only one-fifth of the land 40 years ago had been adequately treated by agriculture—these statements are made on the authority of two eminent experts—we have there, and there alone, if we really choose to solve the unemployed problem, a method by which it can be solved. It seems to me that we are drifting back rapidly to a worse condition than I have ever known. My memory goes back about 50 years, and I have never known such a serious state of affairs in the country as exist at the present moment. There are thousands of people in Scotland, and, probably, in England, in a state of semi-starvation. It was so serious that during the Recess people have been coming to my house, day after day, some of whom had not broken their fast at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and some of whom are living upon one meal a day, and that a very inadequate meal. There are children being born in the West of Scotland for whom their mothers have absolutely no food at their birth, and the anguish is so great as to be almost unbearable.

10.0 P.M.

With the progress of science, with man's power over the raw material of nature, with all the conquests, of which we have heard so much in modern years, it ought not to be that men able and willing to work should be living in this state of semi-starvation. It is a disgrace to our modern civilisation. There is one other aspect of agriculture. It has been suggested by an hon. Member opposite that Labour Members were talking about a subject which they did not understand, of which they had no actual experience. That may be true of some people, but it is not true so far as I am personally concerned. I am the son of agricultural people. I was born in the premier agricultural county of this country, the county of Lincoln. I am the son of generations of people who have been millers and agricultural people and farmers. I have worked upon the land myself, and I have seen what can be done. My father managed a farm for some years and he doubled the yield in the course of the first five years in which he had control of it. Our average yield of wheat per acre is about 30 bushels. In France it is from 40 to 48. In a letter published in the "Daily News" to-day it is given as 47 in Denmark. In the Lothians in Scotland it is 40, and in some other parts of the world it is higher.

The late Dean Stubbs of Chester, who became Bishop of Truro, in his book on "Agriculture and the Labourers" pointed out that on small holdings and allotments the yield was from 56 to 64 bushels per acre. There are many instances where the yield was up to 80 bushels an acre. In the County of Kent only two years ago, according to a report which appeared in "Common Sense," from 90 to 96 bushels to the acre had been obtained. In the State of Washington there is on record an instance of 117 bushels of wheat. If we endeavour to obtain the highest possible yield available, and we use all the scientific knowledge available and all the various methods which have already been tried, we know that we could produce the food supplies which our own people require.

The late General Sir Arthur Cotton, who spent many years of his life in India upon irrigation work, experimented in the closing years of his life in the South of England with regard to intensive cultivation, and he claimed to have produced wheat at the rate of from 100 to 130 bushels per acre. In the articles published by the late Prince Kropotkin, which appeared in the "Nineteenth Century" in 1888, he stated that if we had a population of 70,000,000 people on these lands it would be quite possible to feed them. So far as I know no writer of greater authority has ever appeared in Britain than the great Russian exile who made his home in this land for many years. The closing paragraph of this statement, which is taken from the article in the "Nineteenth Century" of June, 1888, "The coming reign of Plenty," states that if the population of this country were to be doubled all that would be required for producing the food for all the inhabitants would be to cultivate the soil as it is cultivated on the best farms of this country, in Lombardy and in Flanders, and to cultivate the meadows which at present lie almost entirely unproductive in the same way as the neighbourhoods of Paris are cultivated by the Parisian market gardener.

The same great writer published a book called "Fields, Factories and Workshops," and in it he gave the result of intensive cultivation in Great Britain for the previous 50 or 60 years. Among the instances he quotes is one of an exhibitor at the Maidstone Farmers' Club about 1870. There was there shown a specimen of wheat that contained from 7,000 to 8,000 grains, grown from one single grain of seed. There were also exhibited wheat having 96 ears from one seed. Those figures show the extraordinary possibilities which have not yet been reached in our land. There is no question at all as to whether we can feed our own people from our own soil and rivers and seaboard. The three miles area round our coast is far more fertile in food supply than the three miles inland from the coast. If our rivers were purged of the filth which is poured into them by the manufacturers they could be stocked with all kinds of valuable food upon a scale which the average man has not yet imagined as possible. Think of the extraordinary fecundity of fish, and you see at once the great possibilities if we develop our fisheries in conjunction with the production of our soil.

A certain number of hon. Members are not displaying their honour very brightly by laughing at my statements. I have been led to believe in days gone by that when we speak of hon. gentlemen the word "gentleman" conveyed a true and real meaning and referred to men who were gentle men. We on these benches are sometimes reproached for our misconduct, but I must say that, as I try never to interrupt any speaker, and it has always been understood that a Member in making a maiden speech is allowed some latitude, it is scarcely fair that he should be subjected to the kind of treatment to which I am being subjected this evening. I had to undergo a very serious surgical operation some time ago and I have not yet recovered. I had to leave this House in November and go home to Scotland, and I am speaking under very great strain at the present time Interruptions, however, will have no effect on my determination to fight for the cause with which I am connected. I have been an avowed Socialist for the last 35 years, and the longer I live the more am I convinced of the justice and the inevitableness and the desirability of the establishment of a co-operative Commonwealth.

What I have said as to the possibilities of wheat growing applies with equal force to other products. Our average yield of potatoes is about 5½ tons to 6 tons an acre. In Germany some years ago they produced 14 tons to the acre. There are instances on record of a much higher yield than that. It is said that in the United States over 30 tons to the acre have been produced. Then take the yield of milk. Our average yield of milk is about 450 gallons per annum per cow, and there are farms in Lincolnshire and Ayrshire where the average yield of a herd of from 30 to 40 is from 800 to 1,000 gallons per cow per annum. That is by no means the limit. There are instances on record of over 2,000 gallons per cow per annum being yielded. Whether it is the question of wheat or oats or barley or grass land or fruit crops or milk, what are the conclusions that we draw? That we can solve the unemployment problem and draw our own food supplies from our own soil and rivers. It is not a matter to be treated with levity. Only a few years ago the people in the land were in a state of semi-starvation while the War was in progress. In the event of the outbreak of another war and of Britain being involved in conflict with France, which God forbid—it is quite a possibility, and there is no purpose in burking the fact—the lack of food supply would be one of our greatest dangers.

A nation which is self-supporting is in an infinitely stronger position that one of whose people 40 per cent. are fed by the products of its own soil and 60 per cent. are dependent on food supplies from overseas. A representative of the Government told us recently about the Air Force in France. France possesses machines in far greater numbers than ourselves. With aeroplanes flying at the rate of three to four miles a minute, and guns which will carry 60 miles, what is the good of closing our eyes to the fact that we are now part of the great European continent, and that the tight little sea which divided us in former days has to all intents and purposes been eliminated? That is one of the urgent problems which we are bound to consider. Even if private ownership of land remains, the development of our own resources is worthy of the consideration of the Government of the day. Much was said yesterday as to the guilt of the German people, and it was implied, if not asserted, that the German nation was solely responsible for the late war. The question of reparation was dealt with upon that basis. I disagree with that view. I do not believe that any one nation was solely responsible for the War. I believe that just as no man in the nation can be accuser and judge of his own case, so the victorious nations are not themselves the people to judge what the amount of reparation should be.

Much knowledge is now available as to the origin of the War as compared with that which was available in 1914, and if some neutral court could be established among the various great nations of the world to take into consideration the relative guilt of the nations concerned in the War, it might be found that more than one nation in Western Europe had a share in the responsibility of bringing about the War, and probably Britain would not be entirely free. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh, oh!"] Hon. Members may say "Oh!" but, after all, I am here with the right to advance the opinions which I hold just as other hon. Members have the right to advance theirs. I did not interrupt any hon. Member who made observations of a character contrary to those I am now making. The opinion I am expressing is not my opinion only. There are hon. Members on these benches with far better knowledge than I possess, who are far more entitled to speak on this matter than I am, and they have proved, at any rate to my satisfaction, that this view is correct. People like the former Premier of Italy, Signor Nitti, have also referred to this matter, and I do not think it can be seriously disputed that the responsibility for the War devolves upon quite a number of nations, and not upon one only. The point which I wish to make is that we should establish a neutral court to arrive at a decision on those matters, and, in addition to that, take into consideration the amount of reparation which is being demanded from Germany. I am not against reparation, nor has the Labour party been against reparation being paid by the guilty people. To take one instance illustrative of my point, however, I may mention that according to a statement by Professor Keynes, the houses in the northern area of France were built at a cost of about £600 and a sum of £2,275 is being demanded for each, with £1,000 for furniture. These were miners' cottages. If the miners in Northern France were as well housed as that and if their furniture cost £1,000 per house, they must have been infinitely better off than any miners I have ever met in any part of Great Britain. It seems to me an unreasonable and exorbitant demand. All these items should be scaled down. I will bring my speech to a close by expressing my thanks for the hearing accorded me. On the whole, the interruptions have not been very serious. If hon. Members reflect upon the questions which I have indicated, they should see that it would be for the well-being of our nation as a whole that we should strive, in the light of experience, to establish a co-operative commonwealth in these islands—for the well-being of all our people, hon. Members' opposite included.

In rising to support the excellent proposal which my right hon. Friend the late Minister of Labour (Dr. Macnamara) laid before the House this afternoon, I earnestly crave the indulgence and sympathy of hon. Members in submitting my humble opinions for their consideration for the first time. We rather gathered from one hon. and gallant Member who spoke that in his opinion the proposals set forth by the late Minister of Labour were not sound owing to their not being solutions of the unemployment problem. I do not consider it is proposed to be a complete solution, but at least it is a contribution, and in these times I fear that we cannot afford to completely disregard any small but practical contributions which are made from time to time by individual Members of the House. Most of us believe that the only ultimate solution of this problem is the complete revival of trade on a pre-War scale, but at the same time I think the Government would be very ill advised if, when weighing up the pros and cons of the situation as it is to-day, they took into account and regarded as a tangible asset the possibility of a complete trade revival in the near future, because such events as are taking place in the Ruhr, for instance, at the present time, and events which are liable to take place any day owing to the very restless state of Europe, will have a tendency to stop that desirable revival of trade.

The position we have to face, in my humble opinion, appears to be a very clear one. We have in our land to-day, unfortunately, over a million unemployed, and the Prime Ministers of the various Dominions are requesting men to emigrate to become assistants on the land. It appears to me that, although there are a million unemployed people in the country to-day, a majority of whom come from industrial centres, a certain number of that million would be willing and glad to have the opportunity of going to the Colonies and working on the land, and I submit that the first thing to do would be to ascertain from our local Employment Exchanges how many men would be willing, if the opportunity were offered them, to go to one of our Colonies, and if the number were sufficient to warrant such a scheme, I think it would be a very sound plan, as the late Minister told us, if agricultural centres were set up in which to train possible candidates. At the end of, say, a month it would be possible to determine whether a candidate was suitable, by temperament and physically, to undertake such labours, and I submit to the House that it would be a very sound scheme if that were given effect to. The hon. and gallant Member to whom I have referred, also stated that he thought it would be a very expensive undertaking. I submit to his judgment that doles, besides being demoralising, are also very expensive, and instead of spending £110,000,000 a year on the unemployed, if a small amount of that money were employed in setting up these agricultural centres and training the men who would be willing to go to the Colonies, the Colonial Governments, I feel, would be very sympathetically disposed towards the scheme and would help us to finance it.

I do not propose to follow the hon. Members from both sides of the House who have been dealing with the questions of unemployment, housing and the necessitous areas; and for that reason I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State for the Home Department for the moment is not in his place on the Treasury Bench. I wish to express our very profound and sincere regret that no reference is made in the Gracious Speech from the Throne with regard to an important matter that was discussed upon many occasions during last year, and that is the amendment of the law with regard to Workmen's Compensation. All of us who represent large industrial areas must regard the state of the law as it at present stands as very unsatisfactory indeed, and it must not be taken for granted that, because I shall try to be as brief as I can, we do not attach the greatest importance to the subject of amending, as soon as possible, some of the provisions of the present Act of Parliament. On behalf of the wives and children of those who receive non-fatal accidents, and, more important still, the widows and orphans of those who meet with fatal accidents, I think it is proven beyond question that the time is more than ripe for some attention to be given to this matter. I need hardly point out that provision was made by the late Government only for the period of the War to meet what was then considered and known as War-time conditions, and I cannot conceive that any Member of this House on either side sitting on any one of the benches wishes to see the workmen and their families in conditions far worse than pre-War conditions.

I want also to remind the House that the late Government appointed a Depart- mental Committee, who sat for some months, conducted very extensive investigations into every aspect of the case, went into a large amount of detail and sifted all the evidence. That Departmental Committee, presided over by a Member of the late House, a very eminent lawyer, advocated many extensions in order to improve the lot of the worker, especially with regard to his dependants who may be left as a result of a fatal accident. I think I am entitled to point out that this question of compensation is far-reaching in its nature, in view of the fact that every year over half a million fatal and non-fatal accidents take place in the industries of this country. I ask this House to believe that those of us who come from industrial districts know that it is a very serious matter for the workman to go through life dreading the day on which he may be laid off, or may be killed in the mine, or on the railway, or in the factory.

I have so far alluded to the provision made to meet war conditions as being the only real increase that has been made; that is, that the maximum maximum payable in non-fatal accidents has been raised from 20s. to 35s. per week. The widow is still left with the same maximum as in pre-War days. I well remember that the House were quite merry with me when in regard to this matter I made a bull. I was last year describing what happened in a worker's cottage when the bread-winner was taken away and the widow was left with five or six children. Accidentally I made use of a phrase that "if the eldest boy happened to be a girl" there would be no small bread-winner to help to bring some wages into the family exchequer. I want to point out that in the first week of January of this year close to my home the bread-winner was killed. Nine orphan children were left with the mother. The two eldest were girls, one fourteen and the next nearly thirteen, the youngest being a baby of six months. The sum of £300 will be paid in that case. I ask the House to imagine how it is possible for that family to be raised? Nearly every country is in advance of Great Britain so far as these compensation provisions are concerned. The Departmental Committee went fully into the matter last year and found and reported upon the many anomalies that exist. They speci- ally pointed out in regard to widows and children how the widows had been practically starved. On the death of the husband, because, no matter if the widow was left with no children or was left with many, she got £300 if the wages so entitled her. The widow to which I refer with nine children only gets the £300. The Holman Gregory Committee, in their Report point out that there should be a sum set aside for the widow herself, for her compensation exclusively, and also that some amount of provision should be made for each of the children separately.

I do not want to traverse the ground in full again, though it is very important, but the Departmental Committee point out that a good deal of amendment might be brought about, and important improvements effected without placing a very much larger burden upon industry than is the case at the present day. I hope the Home Secretary and the Cabinet may find an answer to our appeal made last year, and repeated several times by resolution, that time will be found to bring in an amending Workmen's Compensation Bill. It is very important that some improvement should be made. If the facts are as stated in a question which appears on the Order Paper for to-morrow, an explosion took place in Stirlingshire in July last year and still no compensation has been paid at all to the widows and children and other dependants. That is the case with regard to fatal accidents, but I think everyone will admit that in non-fatal accidents it is of imperative importance that the workers should be cured as soon as soon as possible, in order that they may return to work and continue to produce the commodities on which they are engaged. I ask that the Home Secretary shall at least carry out the part promise that the late Home Secretary made last year, that if an agreement could be reached between employers and workmen an amending Bill will be brought in. I hope the Government will do something in that direction in order to secure a larger measure of satisfaction and contentment amongst people engaged in industries, and I therefore appeal to the Prime Minister to do this.

I have been tempted to intervene in this Debate by a speech made last night by the hon. Member for the University of London (Sir S. Russell-Wells) in which he submitted a plan for trying to deal with unemployment by the foundation of new industries. I am going to submit to the House an actual example of how we have failed to preserve industries in this country which were employing people before the War. The facts of the case I am giving are known to me. It was a factory which employed 700 or 800 hands, including both sexes, when war broke out. This business happened to be run entirely by German capital, and as a result of the German ownership that business was wound up under the Defence of the Realm Act and sold, and the assets of the factory were bought by British subjects who continued to carry on the manufacture of that particular article very successfully, and they actually employed considerably more employees than were employed in the early days of the War in that factory.

Since the War we have got this position. The factory is now in the hands of British owners using patents which were previously owned by foreigners, and yet owing to the particular conditions resulting after the War, and the absence of any kind of support or protection for that particular manufacture after the War, that trade has been captured by the Germans, with the result that some 700 or 800 persons have been thrown out of work. I want to suggest that, entirely apart from the much more difficult question of finding new industries, if the Government would every now and then take steps to protect against peculiar, abnormal, and unfair competition industries which were worked successfully in this country before the War and since the War, we should do a great deal to stop unemployment. I only rose for the purpose of putting that as a practical case, which I hope the Government will consider, to reinforce the very interesting and very useful suggestion made by my hon. Friend last night, and to express the opinion that as many thinking Free Traders realise that a new country at least must protect its industries if it means to have any at all, so in abnormal times like these, according to reasonable Free Trade doctrine, there are circumstances under which you are entitled to protect for a time an industry which in past periods has been shown can be carried on still in this country.

I want to draw the attention of the House to one point which has not been dealt with during these two days discussion. May I preface my remarks by saying that I sat this afternoon at the beginning of the sitting listening to a speech which amazed me. I gathered from the speech of the hon. and gallant Member for Reading (Major Cadogan) that the chief trouble with the country at the present time and that the main cause of unemployment is that there are too many being born and too few who die, and that it is a pity the rest do not emigrate. If he gets his own way, he will find himself a modern economic Robinson Crusoe, and if I were his constituents, I would make him a political Robinson Crusoe. I wonder how any man dare get up, after the experience of the last few years, and make such a speech. A few years ago we were told that the chief trouble was that there were not plenty of men in the country. Now we are told that there are too many men in the country and that the trouble is chiefly due to the fact that there has been no emigration. I want to draw attention to the fact that in one industry—the coal-mining industry—the owners are asking that the men should work increased hours. Yet, according to the Board of Trade figures, there are 56,000 miners unemployed at the present time. Hon. Gentlemen talk about devastated France. What about giving devastated Britain a chance for once? I do not think it is under-estimating the French suffering to say that the German guns did not do more havoc upon the French and Belgian villages than the Coalition peace has done among the working class in this country. The devastation here is equally as bad, and its effect is continuing far longer than with any other country. The Government ought to put it clearly to the French and Belgian Governments that if they have suffered—and we regret they have—our people too have suffered during the last three years as a result of the peace.

The Seven Hours Act is on the Statute Book, the French have marched into the Ruhr, and now the coalowners are coming along and, because there is a shortage of coal owing to the demand from Germany, France, America and other parts of the world, are declaring they will have to increase the working hours of the miners, notwithstanding that 56,000 miners are already out of work in Great Britain alone. If the Government who represent the coalowners after all want really to settle the unemployment question they would not be talking of extending the working hours of miners. Let me say this. We are in this position in the mining industry—I wish other industries were in the same position. We have the Seven Hours Act on the Statute Book. Anyone who has had experience in mining knows that seven hours is long enough to work underground. In the industrial area I come from coal hewers have had the seven-hour day for 40 years, and as one who himself has worked on the coal face, I declare that seven hours is more than I wanted. While I do not think there is any real solution of the unemployment problem to be found in the present system. I tell hon. and right hon. Gentlemen it will be to their own benefit to seek to find a solution of the problem by lessening the hours of the workers and thus save themselves probably from some worse catastrophe—some worse crisis than that we are passing through now. The hon. Member for South Croydon (Sir Allan Smith) uttered some very solemn words the other day. He stated, in an interview, that next winter was going to be worse than last winter. That is a terrible position for the country to face, and I again tell the Government and those who sit behind them, that they ought to seek means for lowering instead of increasing working hours, so as to provide some temporary solution, at least, of the present position. I suggest to the coalowners that they do not carry their claim any further. They want to get that Act off the Statute Book, but, although we are in a minority, I think we can say, at any rate, that not only the Government, but the coalowners will be wanting some tranquillity before they get it off if they attempt it in this House.

The Government want to settle the unemployment question along their own lines. They want their own schemes to be tested and tried. I do not believe, however, that they have tried seriously to carry out their own scheme. I represent an area where there are some thousands of unemployed, and where a certain urban council asked that a scheme might be accepted which would give employment to 200 men. That is not very many, but I would sooner do something towards getting employment for 200 men than make an eloquent speech about 2,000,000 and get nothing done. They wanted to carry that scheme through, but they were told, "Oh, no; that does not come under the heading of a necessitous area." That council has these able-bodied men there, wanting to do the work, and asks the Ministry of Health, under its own scheme, to give the necessary grant, and it is refused. That ought not to be the case, and, as far as the Government scheme itself is concerned, there is something wrong in regard to its efficient administration.

I cannot understand at all the point of view of men who can accept a system of society in which this is the normal state of things. As far as I understand it, millions of workers are wanting clothes, millions of workers are wanting boots, rolling-stock is wanted, locomotives are wanted, and all the rest of it, in all parts of Europe and in different parts of the world. Our people here are wanting to supply them. The will is there, the ability, both mental and physical, is there, the land is there, the minerals are in the earth; all that is necessary to produce is there. What is it that stops it? The root of the whole matter is the fact that there are persons who own the land, who rest upon industry, who make no contribution to the wealth of the world, and who are the real people who stand in the way of the workers producing the things that are needed. If the workers of this country could only awaken to the fact that gentlemen can come here and make such speeches as that of the hon. and gallant Member for Reading to-night, which is representative of the Government propaganda, which is representative of their leaflets and of a good many of their speeches—if the workers could only hear such speeches as that, not only would the hon. and gallant Member for Reading be cleared out, but the workers would take charge of this Parliament and of the affairs of this country, and possibly would find a way of solving these questions themselves.

Motion made, and Question, "That the Debate be now adjourned," put, and agreed to.—[ Mr. Robertson. ]

Debate to be resumed To-morrow.

I should like to raise a question which has been very acute relating to some school children in Glasgow. According to the Education Act, 1908, local education authorities, or school boards as they were at that time, were empowered to feed children where it was regarded as being necessary. In 1922 a dispute arose between a parish council in Scotland and the education authority as to whose duty it was to feed those children. The Glasgow education authority, in a desire for economy, and to suit the taste of some of its members, who thought they might absolve themselves from the responsibility of cutting off the feeding of children, approached the Scottish Office for a ruling on the matter and Circular 51 was issued in which the interpretation of the Act was given that education authorities were under no obligation to feed school children until it could be proved that their health was actually endangered, and that interpretation allowed the Glasgow education authority to cut off the feeding of approximately 10,000 children. One of the rather ironical phases of the matter was that on the day the children got their summer holidays they had been fed. They went on holiday for seven weeks and from that time they have not received feeding at the schools. This, it seems to me, is a question which ought to be dealt with by the new Government. The matter has been well enough known to everyone. It has been known to the late Government. It has been known to all those who hold office in the present Government, and the agitation that has been carried on in Glasgow and all over Scotland has been sufficient to warrant some consideration being given to the matter on the part of the present Government. I should like to know if this is one of the matters the Government are considering. The 10,000 children who were cut off at the beginning of the school holidays last year are, for the most part, still going without food provided at the school. In the circumstances of to-day it means that, while the education authority are saving money on school meals, on the other hand boards of health are, or will be, responsible for expenditure for remedying the results of underfeeding, because there is not the slightest doubt that of these 9,000 children only about 1,000 are being fed after that interpretation of the Act. These children are going without proper nourishment. In many cases they are going without proper clothing and without proper boots. That fact, quite apart from the question of health, which is a serious matter, makes the children not in a fit condition to receive the education which the teachers endeavour to impart. It has an effect upon the teachers, and makes for inefficiency in every direction. I hope the Government will give this matter their consideration, and that they will endeavour to make the education authorities understand that it never was intended, as I believe it never was intended by the Government which passed the Clause, that the children should be failing in health and should have become almost ill before they were entitled to receive any food. The fact that many of the parents are unemployed or on short time, and that wages have been reduced to such an extent, while the cost of living has not come down to the same extent, makes it more necessary to-day than ever it was that these children should be fed. We have to remember that, desirable as economy may be from the Government point of view, they are only saving in one direction to spend it in another. We who represent Glasgow constituencies are continually having this matter pressed upon us. Letters are reaching us every day, urging us to raise the question and get something done, and the duty is imposed upon us to do what we can for our constituencies. I hope the Scottish Office will give this matter their consideration and cause further instructions to be issued to the education authorities that a rigid interpretation of the Act was not intended.

It being Eleven of the Clock, the Motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House do now adjourn."—[ Colonel Leslie Wilson. ]

I wish to raise the question of the havoc caused in Scotland through the growing evil of deer forests. In my own constituency there is a farmer who suffered loss of grain, valued by an independent valuer, to the extent of £109 last year. That man has no compensation and no redress. Other farmers in the same position have equally no redress. Previous Governments have appointed no fewer than six different Commissions or Committees, and those Commissions or Committees have reported that this evil of deer forests is a growing evil, that it destroys agriculture in Scotland, that it is the prime cause of the emigration of the Scottish people, and that it is responsible for the physical and economic deterioration of our race. In the year 1921 a Committee on Game and Heather Burning reported, and both majority and minority reports condemned the growing evil of deer forests. The minority report says:—

The serious position in which we find ourselves can be gathered from the last census. Farmers and graziers have decreased by 4,505, shepherds by 1,220, farm servants by 49,428. But game keepers are on the increase to the extent of 1,673. Yet hon. Members talk about the emigration of our surplus population at a time when you have 4,000,000 acres of Scotland exclusively devoted to deer forests. The best and the healthiest population in the world have been driven oversea. A soap boiler comes up and buys an island under the silly system of land ownership, and calls himself "Lord of the Western Isles" or something like that, and last week arrangements were made to deport 800 of the finest peasantry in the world beyond the sea. How long is this kind of thing to continue? The population, the material wealth of the country, the food production of the country, and its economic value are decreasing, and Scotland is being turned into a pleasance ground for idle parasitic rich, who crowd up to Scotland on the 12th August, dressed in kilts, with their French cooks and their butlers, to hunt tame deer over land that once reared a whole peasantry. If the Government does not move in this matter, we will have, for the first time in the history of the Labour party, the farming community in Scotland behind us, and we will pester and worry the Government until this scandal is stopped. I would like to hear from the Government what its plans are for the immediate redress of the grievance.

I wish to revert to the topic of the Glasgow school children, without in any way taking the attention of the House from the question raised by the last speaker. I want to emphasise the shameful condition of our poorer classes in Glasgow, and particularly the intensification of misery which has been brought about by the issue of Circular 51 by the Scottish Education Department under the late Government. That circular stated: Concluding, the Circular states:

If we, as a Government policy, are going to destroy the physique, the moral and the intellect of the children of our big cities, God help this nation in the future when it has got to take its place in the industrial struggle of the world. A Professor of Glasgow University has just concluded an investigation into the physiological condition of the population of the East End of Glasgow. We get reports every week from our medical officers examining children in the schools in Glasgow, showing the speed at which deterioration is taking place. The late Premier told us during the War period that we were a C 3 population. Heaven only knows what letter in the alphabet will describe our category if this process goes on much longer. I do not want to make it a matter of fighting. I want to appeal to our Scottish Office not to continue a policy of ruining the character of the people of Scotland by striking at the children. Surely, if there are quarrels between capitalists and workers, we can fight them out. Let us hammer one another without mercy, but let us at least have the amount of morality that is observed in international warfare, and try to keep the children off the battlefield. I appeal to the Scottish Office, not merely to do something, because I know that this is receiving their attention, but to do something immediately, something temporarily, if need be, to have the children fed while the various Departments are fighting out their quarrel.

If I may revert to the Highlands of Scotland—

Give the Government time to reply.

They can reply to-morrow. I have listened all day yesterday and to-day and have at last got in, and I intend to make the very best use of the few moments at my disposal. It is perfectly true what the hon. Member for Stirlingshire (Mr. Johnstone) has said, that deer are more important in the Highlands of Scotland now than men evidently are. I would remind those who have been sneering at us yesterday and to-day—and we have not got a fair crack of the whip—that in the Highlands of Scotland are the descendants of those who stood against Rome's Imperial forces—that hardy, intelligent race. The right hon. Member for Swansea (Sir A. Mond), the last time he made any reference to the case, suggested that my race should emigrate ayont the seas—my race, whose blood bedewed the heather in the defence of their native land. To think that they have to be insulted in this fashion by individuals of that type who have difficulty in enunciating the English language.

I think we had better not begin to criticise one another's pronunciation.

I thank you for that word. It nerves my heart, it steels my sword. My tongue is the tongue of my native land, and it is not German. I would have you to bear that in mind, and those who are in opposition to me. I take that off nobody, not the King of England, never mind anybody else, Speaker as you may be.

Order, order!

I was defending the hon. Member.

I do not need anybody to defend me. I want to say this. I will give the gentry opposite some information, that when Britain was up against it in the Napoleonic wars, the Isle of Skye produced 10,000 men to the British army. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] Shame on you if you turn us away as did the dukes and the earls and your class who sent the descendants of these men across the wild Atlantic seas. That is the fate that is meted out to them. What do we find at the moment? The highland glens and straths of my native land are deserted, and there is no population there now. The hardiest race that the sun ever shone on have been forced to leave their native land in order to make room for men of the type of the hon. Gentleman to indulge in deer shooting and grouse shooting. Those men who talk so glibly about

Mr. SPEAKER, in pursuance of Standing Order No. 1 (Sittings of the House), has nominated—

The Right Hon. Sir Frederick George Banbury, Baronet,

Lieut.-Colonel the Right Hon. Sir John Gilmour, Baronet,

emigration do so because they have no native land. We in Scotland have a native land, and we are not going to see our native land stolen from us or bought from the dukes and the earls. Those are the people you support—the people who have always betrayed us; and I want it to be remembered at all times that, when I rise in this House, I do not rise to sue for peace, that is, I do not rise to ask for any concession. This is a very serious matter. We have been quite prepared to do all that we can to build up not only a better Britain but a better world. There is no sacrifice too great for the men who occupy these benches to make in order to leave the world better than they found it. It is not self-interest that sends us here. When we rise—at any rate, when I rise in my seat—it is not to ask for con cessions, just as the great patriot of my country, Sir William Wallace, said before the battle of Stirling Brig, when the English sent representatives to him. His reply to them was: "No, we are not here to sue for peace; we are here to fight for liberty." That is exactly what we are here for. We are here to fight for liberty, and the raising of this question regarding the deer forests gives me an opportunity of doing so. You men who live on the fat of the land and have never known what it is to go in search of a job—

The hon. Member must address the Chair.

It being Half-past Eleven of the Clock, Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at Half after Eleven o'Clock.

The Right Hon. John Frederick Peel Rawlinson, K.C.,

Lieut.-Colonel the Hon. Arthur Cecil Murray, and

Robert Young, Esquire,

to act during this Session as temporary Chairmen of Committees when requested by the Chairman of Ways and Means.